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ahmed things.

resume

Product Designer.

What I have built, where, and what shipped.

principles

01

Design in the build

A mockup cannot tell you what empty data or a slow response feels like. I work in the running app, so the thing I am judging is the thing that ships.

02

Build it once

One tile, one indicator, one shell. A new screen is composed from components that already exist, which is how one designer keeps a large surface coherent.

03

Motion has a job

A transition should answer where something went or what just changed. If it cannot, I cut it. Nobody on an old laptop should pay for my taste.

04

Accessible on the first pass

Focus states, reduced motion, and real semantics go in while the component is being written. Retrofitting them later means writing it twice.

updated august 2026Download PDF

Ahmed Gamal

Product Designer · New York

WorkContactahmedthings.cominfo@ahmedthings.com

About

I design AI-native tools and ship them. Primitives, interaction models, design systems, brand, and production code. Spent three years as founding designer at Thread AI, where I took its platform, Lemma, from zero to product.

Co-Founder of The Director's Cut, a video review tool for filmmakers. Sole designer and engineer on it, front end through backend.

Six years designing inside feature-animation pipelines at Warner Bros. and DreamWorks, where I learned how multi-stage systems with hard constraints actually behave: staged dependencies, strict handoffs, deterministic output under pressure. That is the same problem AI workflow orchestration is trying to solve, and it is why I design orchestration tools the way I do.

Capabilities

→ Product + Systems

AI-native interface design · workflow and orchestration UX · human-in-the-loop and agentic systems · design systems and token architecture · 0→1 product definition · zero-to-platform scaling

→ Engineering

React · TypeScript · Tailwind · Next.js · Supabase (schema, auth, storage) · Git-based workflow, PRs into production · Claude Code and agentic build pipelines · full-stack, prototype through deployment

→ Brand + Craft

Brand identity and visual systems · motion and interaction design · environment and world building · visual narrative and storyboarding · art direction

Education

Post Grad Studies

School of Visual Arts · New York · 2016

Bachelor of Science in Architecture Design

Academy of Science and Technology · Alexandria · 2009

Experience

Co-Founder + Design Engineer

June 2026 → Current

The Director's Cut · New York

Co-founded with an Emmy-winning director. Sole designer and engineer. Owned every layer: positioning, brand, interface, front end, backend, and deployment.

  • Identified the problem from inside the industry. Directors review a cut 10–20+ times and hand off hundreds of timecoded notes to each post department every round, rewriting the same unresolved notes version after version in tools (Frame.io) built for technical sign-off, not creative feedback. Defined the product, scope, and positioning independently.
  • Designed and built the full front end in React 19, TypeScript, and Tailwind v4. No handoff, no translation loss between design and implementation.
  • Architected the backend on Supabase (Postgres + Auth + Storage): schema design with row-level security, email/password auth, cloud sync of notes and metadata, and blob storage for attachments — voice notes, frame sketches, reference images. Video runs two paths under one note layer: multi-gigabyte masters referenced on disk by fingerprint, or a private 1080p proxy on Cloudflare Stream with signed playback gated by the same RLS.
  • Deployed to production on Vercel; private password-gated preview. Walkthrough on request.

Founding Product Designer

May 2023 → Aug 2026

Thread AI · New York

First designer. Built the product, the design system, and the brand.

  • Designed the Worker Builder, Thread AI's AI workflow orchestration tool: the primitives, the canvas interaction model, and the mental models that make non-deterministic agent systems legible, inspectable, and trustworthy to operators.
  • Ship production front-end code. Own components in the codebase and open PRs directly rather than handing off specs, which removes a translation layer between design intent and what users get.
  • Took Lemma, Thread AI's platform, from zero to product: its surfaces, the underlying design system, and the company's visual identity, as the only designer through 18 engineers and two funding rounds.
  • Built and maintain the design system and token architecture as a single source of truth spanning Figma and code.
  • Designed Thread AI's brand from scratch and carried it across product, marketing site, commercial assets, and documentation.

Animation Systems + Environment Design

Jul 2017 → Mar 2023

Warner Bros. Animation / DreamWorks Animation · Los Angeles

Six years designing inside large-scale production pipelines with hard technical constraints and non-negotiable handoffs.

  • Selected into DreamWorks' competitive 12-week visual development program, then hired onto feature animation production.
  • Led environment design on animated series at Warner Bros., working the full pipeline from storyboard through layout to production — a staged, dependency-heavy system where every output has to meet a downstream department's spec exactly.
  • Delivered under fixed episodic deadlines across seven productions, including 1000 minutes of classical flagship Looney Tunes shorts.

UX Designer

January 2014 → July 2017

Braze · New York

Designed and evolved the design system and core user flows for an enterprise customer-engagement platform through a period of rapid product expansion. Made complex marketing and segmentation tooling legible to non-technical operators — the same problem class as making agent orchestration legible today.

Graphic Designer

February 2012 → January 2014

Gravity Media · New York

Designed brand assets, pitch decks, and motion graphics for media clients, supporting live broadcast productions with fast, precise design work that balanced storytelling, clarity, and visual consistency.