Karthik Handral.
Nice to properly meet you.
I tend to get handed the messy problems. Enterprise tools, five stakeholders with five different opinions, workflows that only make sense to the three people who've used them for a decade. I like untangling that. Sitting with it, actually talking to the people stuck using it, and building something that survives the inevitable moment someone changes their mind.
Say hi on LinkedIn ↗
somewhere near bear lake, colorado
The thinking
behind the pixels.
Design isn't just how a product works. It's how it makes people feel. Calm"Ah, finding the export button was easy.". Confident"I've got this, hit submit without double checking.". That's what I'm after, most days.
Most of what I design starts with someone complaining, usually something like "why does this take four clicks" or "I genuinely don't understand what this button does." I get far more invested in fixing that than the situation probably requires.
Honestly, I didn't plan any of this. I liked drawing as a kid. That was it, no bigger ambition. Somewhere along the way, drawing turned into noticing why things looked the way they did, or worked the way they did, and that habit never really left, even after the drawing did.
Eight years in, and the actual process hasn't changed much. Find what feels off. Figure out why. Keep at it until it doesn't feel off anymore. Most days, that's the entire job, dressed up in nicer words.
I do all of this from Amsterdam now, where there's a word for design that quietly works: lekkerfeels just right. Not flashy. Just right. Most days, that's still the whole goal.
Think you can design a button people would actually want to click?
Right now I'm Lead Design Consultant at TCS. Some days that means enterprise software, other days something else entirely. But it's almost always business leaders, a room that rarely agrees on much, and shaping a design strategy everyone can actually get behind.
Outside of that, it's weekend hikes I'm usually under-prepared for, a running list of Amsterdam neighbourhoods I still haven't properly explored, and the occasional trip built entirely around one place I read about and couldn't stop thinking about. Reach out if any of that sounds like your kind of conversation.
Where I've built
Lead Design Consultant
2024 to PresentSetting design direction across product initiatives, working closely with senior stakeholders, plus pushing a fair number of AI-powered concepts into something actually production-ready.
Senior Designer
2022 to 2023End-to-end design across complex enterprise products, from research through delivery, building out design systems, and mentoring a small design team.
UX Designer & UI Developer
2016 to 2022Bridged design and front-end development, prototyping in the morning, shipping HTML, CSS and JavaScript in the afternoon, across a handful of client engagements.
Occasional thoughts, mostly on LinkedIn
A short one on where clever design tips into manipulation, and why that line matters more than we admit.
Some of the sneakiest UX decisions aren't accidents. Worth a second look at what you click without thinking.
Fewer elements doesn't automatically mean better design. Sometimes it just means less thinking went into it.
Voice, NLP, and what happens to design when there's nothing left to look at.
Dayananda Sagar College of Engineering
Bachelor of Engineering, Medical Electronics, 2012 to 2016