CV

The pixels are the obvious part of design, the bit everyone sees. Behind them is where the strategy lives and where the work matters most. Information architecture and interaction design, shaped by real customer needs, user feedback and solid heuristics, are what make a product work. A lean design system keeps the visual layer quick to build, for the team and for the agents now building alongside it. With those basics in place and AI-powered prototyping on top, an idea can be in front of users the same week.

Product and brand design for BVNK, a Mastercard company since August 2026, run as an AI-native design function. Design works across the business: with product and engineering on what gets built, with sales on how it’s sold, and with teams from finance to compliance on what it has to do.

Leadership

A team of five product and brand designers, with a ladder from junior to principal, and commit, stretch and drop assignments agreed with every designer each quarter.

Design ops

A suite of AI agents that supports the team’s operating rhythm. Quarterly planning against the roadmap, weekly plans and reports, prep for every 1:1, predictive staffing so design headcount is raised before the work lands, and docs kept connected across Jira, Confluence, Figma and code.

AI

A design skill that encodes how BVNK designs, so AI agents produce work that is on-brand and on-system. Design specs are written for machines as well as people.

Design system

Atomic, documented in Storybook, from tokens and components up to patterns and screen rules. Between August 2025 and November 2026, adoption went from 12% to about 75% across seven apps.

Vision prototype

A working model of the platform kept about a year ahead of the roadmap. The company uses it to agree how the platform should look and behave before anything is built, so the arguments happen on a prototype instead of in code.

Product

One platform where fiat and stablecoins move together, for businesses and for the companies embedding it. Compliance, liquidity and multiple chains sit underneath; the work is turning them into flows a finance team can run without needing to see any of it. Now designing for AI agents as customers too, starting with the experience around BVNK’s MCP server.

Brand

Within seven weeks of BVNK joining Mastercard, the website, sales library, social and email had all moved to one new identity that keeps the best of both brands.

Sales

Bespoke enterprise demos for Fortune 500 companies, plus pre-launch prototypes, decks and sales material, so conversations start months before a product is generally available.

More in the long reads: billing, the design system, the vision prototype and the move into Mastercard’s brand.

End-to-end product design, UX research and UX writing for Skrill, Neteller and Paysafecard, with an international team of 16.

Acquisition

Landing pages, onboarding and KYC, the journeys where people decide whether to stay.

Payments

Multi-currency portals, send and receive, crypto buying and trading.

Loyalty

Rewards and lifestyle sections, with game mechanics to bring people back.

Design system

One system for web and mobile across the consumer division. Theming saved weeks when the Skrill and Neteller front ends merged.

Discovery

Research and quick prototypes to test value before anything went to high fidelity. 50+ customer interviews in Brazil, Portugal and the UK, and a diary study with twelve UK non-users that brought the team an organisation-level award.

CX Talks

A company-wide session every two weeks on research and design work.

More in the long reads: the design system, customer centricity and mixing research with data.

Design for Infragistics’ Angular components and the design kits that matched them, with a team of two designers. We also worked on a design-to-code tool, now Infragistics App Builder, that turned Figma and Sketch designs into code built on those components.

ilyan.com

Senior Art Director, then Creative Director, 2014 to 2015. Facebook and online games for Shumensko, Chupa Chups and Danone Activia, with a BGSite 2014 award for Shumensko.

New Moment New Ideas

Art Director, 2013. Vivacom.

DDB Sofia

Graphic designer to Art Director, 2008 to 2013. Mtel, Handy, Piraeus Bank, Alpha Bank. Now guts&brainsDDB.

Acanthus Publishing

Graphic intern in Boston, 2007.

2026

New Bulgarian University, guest lecture on design systems

2024

UX Sofia, “Beyond Faster Horses: Unlocking Real Value with Customer Outcomes”

2022

DesignOps Sofia, recording in Bulgarian

2017

AngularConnect, London, recording

American University in Bulgaria, journalism and mass communication.