Ishmael
McCalla.
Founding designer · Design engineer · AI-native
London-based designer who ships AI products end-to-end. Seven years across brand, product, and web; two years founding CoverTurn, where I designed and built a production AI chatbot, an autonomous outbound voice agent, and a complete original brand system. Looking to bring that into a team where design, AI, and code share a desk.
Five projects shipped in the last five weeks. AI products, brand systems, and client builds.
Check the Lease, my Replit 10 Year hackathon entry
A free AI lease reader for any US renter or landlord, shipped solo with Replit Agent in 24 hours (May 2-3 2026). Original brand, hand-coded illustrations, and a 50-state legal-aid directory. Live, free, never stored.
Read the case study →Two AI agents, both live, both customer-facing
A chatbot that captures leads from the website around the clock, and a voice agent that runs outbound sales calls and books demos. Both designed and shipped solo, both speaking for the brand.
Read the case study →CoverTurn, an AI-native web agency
Founded and shipped end-to-end. The Webverse brand system, the marketing site, and two production AI agents (chatbot + outbound voice). All live, all from one designer.
Read the case study →Maximus Elite, premium hospitality recruitment
London recruitment agency. End-to-end brand, voice, and conversion-led landing page shipped in 48 hours. Lighthouse 99 desktop, Accessibility 97. Live and converting briefs from launch.
Read the case study →The Webverse, an original visual universe
Authored from blank canvas. A comic-book-meets-editorial identity built around halftone print-craft and CMYK colour. Applied across eight live surfaces, WCAG 2.2 AA throughout.
Read the brand case study →Niche-specific landing pages I designed and shipped.
Laurent Aesthetics
Dark cinematic luxury landing page concept. Cormorant Garamond Light + DM Sans, champagne gold and soft rose on near-black. An Upper East Side aesthetics studio direction.
Lashes by Demi
Warm editorial botanical landing page. Blush and rose backgrounds, botanical-green CTAs, champagne-gold highlights. Cormorant Garamond Light + Montserrat.
Fade & Crown
Premium barbershop landing page. Editorial barber aesthetic: dark surfaces, generous whitespace, considered photography, single-tap booking flow.
Martinez Defense
Solo-attorney authority landing page. Navy and gold, trust-led copy, 24/7 chatbot capture for late-night searches. Designed for the mobile-first emergency moment.
What I do, and what I use to do it.
What I do
- Build production AI chatbots end-to-end (Claude API, Cloudflare Workers, Claude Code)
- Ship live websites from blank canvas to deployed in days
- Conversation design for chatbots, voice agents, and copilots
- Original brand systems and visual identity
- End-to-end product design (research, IA, UX, UI)
- Vibe-coding: design and ship in the same loop with Claude Code, Cursor, and Lovable
Tools
- Design
- Figma, Adobe Creative Suite, Framer
- Code
- HTML, CSS, JavaScript, TypeScript, React, Tailwind, Next.js (via Claude Code)
- AI
- Claude API, Cursor, Claude Code, Anthropic SDK, Retell, ChatGPT, Gemini
- Image gen
- Midjourney, Nano Banana Pro, Imagen
- Voice and video
- ElevenLabs, Veo
- Ship
- Cloudflare Workers, Webflow, Lovable, GitHub, Stripe
Standards I design against
- Accessibility
- WCAG 2.2 AA, ARIA patterns, prefers-reduced-motion, keyboard-first
- Usability
- Nielsen's 10 heuristics, Fitts's Law, Hick's Law, gestalt grouping
- Performance
- Core Web Vitals, Lighthouse 95+, sub-three-second mobile loads
- Visual
- 8pt grid, modular type scale, 60/30/10 colour, 4.5:1 contrast minimum
- Conversation
- Grice's Cooperative Principle, conversation design canon, Cialdini, SPIN
- Copy
- Forward-looking framing, active voice, locale-correct, audited every release
What I bring to your team.
I founded CoverTurn two years ago to learn how to design and ship AI products end-to-end. Real client work, two production AI agents, an original brand system, all live. I want to bring that into a team.
What that gives you: a designer who designs, builds, and ships in the same loop. Strong taste, comfortable with ambiguity, fluent in Claude Code, Cursor, and Lovable, holds the brand and the code to the same standard.
How I work: WCAG 2.2 AA as a floor. Nielsen's heuristics on every interaction. Lighthouse 95+ on Core Web Vitals. Copy audited before every deploy.
What I'm not looking for: another solo founder seat. I've done that and want to specialise on a real product team. The team I'd join is one where designers shape AI products, brand systems hold the line, and craft sits next to velocity.
Available for founding designer and design engineer roles. Let's talk.