About
Artist, Designer, Optimist, Outdoorsman & Huge Nerd
I’m Kevin Lafin, a product designer focused on meticulous execution and user-centered outcomes. I prioritize pixel-perfect detail while ensuring every experience is intuitive and enjoyable for customers.
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Outside of work, you’ll find me in the mountains chasing perfect landscape shots - and the cardio that comes with them.
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Below, I’ve summarized my skills and work history, with deeper dives into each role.
Skills
UI/UX & Product Design
I gather requirements and resources, map user flows, craft high-fidelity UI, and build detailed, interactive prototypes to meet project needs. All final designs are thoroughly annotated to ensure a seamless developer handoff.
Design Systems
A detailed, accessible design system is essential for consistency across all products and brands. Using the Atomic Design model, we identify which components should serve as core elements versus one-off solutions. By deconstructing elements to their essential building blocks and scaling from there, we ensure maintainability and cross-platform consistency.
Branding & Illustration
Across personal and professional projects, I’ve spent thousands of hours working in pen and paper, Adobe Creative Cloud, and Procreate to deliver illustrative and branding work for clients of all sizes - along with plenty of exploratory work for fun.
Large & Small Format Printing
In previous roles, I partnered with large clients to deliver screen-printing and printed-media solutions, either by designing directly for them or providing design support to ensure print-ready, production-quality deliverables.
Documentation
An unsung hero of the design world is not only designing a feature, but explaining and showing in detail how it should function. Along with detailed annotation work in finished files, Confluence documents are key to providing an accessible "North Star" to developers and project managers making the feature come alive.
Work Experience
UI/UX Product Designer / 2021 - 2026
tastytrade is a brokerage platform built for active traders, with a strong focus on options, futures, stocks, and other tradable assets in one place. It emphasizes a DIY trading experience with powerful tools, fast execution, and a clean interface that makes advanced trading strategies easier to manage.
Senior Designer / 2019 - 2021
Off Center was a Chicago-based creative agency that blended design, strategy, development, and marketing to solve business problems with custom, non-cookie-cutter solutions. It positioned itself as a “disruptive” or “off center” partner for ambitious brands, with a small team focused on solving complex challenges and making bold creative work.
Culture Studios
Print Production Artist / 2017 - 2019
Culture Studio is a Chicago-based custom merchandise and apparel production company that served music, entertainment, retail, and e-commerce brands at scale. It combined creative services, garment sourcing, and high-volume manufacturing with a strong emphasis on technology and fast fulfillment.
FindMeInk
Creative Director / 2016 - 2017
FindMeInk was a Chicago-based SaaS startup for the tattoo industry that helped artists manage portfolios and helped customers discover tattoo artists. It was basically a tattoo search engine and artist marketplace, sometimes described as “Behance + Zocdoc for tattoos.”
Education
Columbia College Chicago
Bachelor of Arts
My time at Columbia was a wealth of experience in all formats of design. Focusing heavily in semantic and branding design, I gained the confidence and knowledge to hit the ground running when I graduated in 2015.