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I have taste, and I know how to control it.

I'm Simon Martin, a digital designer and the one person behind simbolik (simbolik.ai), a studio that turns a company's brand and taste into rules AI cannot break.

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An eye drawn in characters.

One person, no handoffs.

AI tools get most work about 70% complete. A senior person on the team then spends hours every week fixing the rest by hand. I solve that with a system that keeps the AI's output accurate and on brand: a design system the AI can read, the company's idea of what great looks like written down as rules, and checks that catch anything outside them before a person sees it. Clients buy design and brand systems, AI systems, or advisory, per project or on a retainer.

  • From design

    Taste

    Hierarchy, restraint, and knowing a layout is off before I can say why.

  • From infrastructure

    Control

    The servers and scripts that make a rule run every time, not only when somebody remembers it.

  • From AI

    Speed

    I design with AI inside the same kind of system I build for clients. Nobody waits on a meeting, because there's nobody else to meet.

How a designer ended up running servers.

From Photoshop 7.0 to the system this site runs on.

  1. I was 10 when I first opened it.

  2. Made for GameSpot Unions, the groups players formed on GameSpot's forums.

  3. My first logo.

  4. Remember it? My first website, on a theme from RocketTheme.

  5. Built on phpBB, and run by me.

  6. A mod for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, which I'm counting as design.

  7. At a print house, where shipped means shipped. Paper has no hotfix.

  8. I went out on my own, and started experimenting with HTML.

  9. I joined its South Africa team and stayed until 2024. The same year, I made icon packs for Android.

  10. Two years before I started designing for crypto startups.

  11. At a security firm, where the brand has to look like it can keep a secret.

  12. Freelance again, designing for them.

  13. Designing its website.

  14. A year spent getting better at both.

  15. This time as a UI/UX and graphic designer.

  16. I started building servers and learning networking. The homelab comes from here.

  17. I went deep on local models, agents and automation.

  18. Here we are. A free design system, and this site, built by DesignJin inside its rules.

It started in 2003 with Photoshop 7.0, at age 10. Banners for GameSpot Unions followed, then a mod for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, then a job at a print house. Freelance work came next, along with brand identity for a security firm and 20+ crypto startups branded for Momentum 6. For Quantive, I designed and built 30+ landing pages as one system; site-wide conversion rose 10%.

From 2017 to 2024 I led the marketing team at The Jane Goodall Institute South Africa. The institute had no Instagram account, so I started one and grew it past 50,000 followers. I also ran its Facebook page, with 190,000 followers, and used both, along with email, for donation campaigns. Donation income grew 20%, social engagement 30%, and website traffic 25%.

At AMPECO, I created the company's new design system and built an AI design engine on top of it. An agent checks every output against the system before a person does. On-brand work moved from one designer's queue to the whole team, with 5x the output on tasks that involve design. The design system is still being finished, and I have started moving the company's old pages onto it.

The Simbolik Design System is free and open source. DesignJin, my own design agent, built simbolik.ai inside it. Torus, a 1,745-entry encyclopedia for the game X4: Foundations, runs on it too.

I once had a local AI read years of journals and name the biggest weakness. It said “confusing infrastructure with progress.” I did not argue.

Everything
I recommend,
I ran first.

In 2024 I turned my focus to hardware infrastructure. Servers first, then networking, then AI models running locally. Two self-built machines now handle local AI, agents, and automation, and any advice simbolik gives on private AI gets tested there first.

Opinionated on purpose.

Written down, so I can't talk myself out of them.

An essence of consciousness drawn in characters: a soft shape that keeps swelling and changing, currents circling its bright heart and trailing off as smoke, and now and then a red spark of thought traveling out along a current.

  • Ship the thing

    Every project ends in something you can use: a page, a system, a repo, a written verdict. Meetings can help. They aren't the product.

  • Taste stays in the loop

    AI does the volume. A person decides what's good enough to ship, and that decision goes into the system so nobody has to make it twice.

  • Small beats swollen

    Start with the smallest version that proves the idea. Then improve the parts real use actually touches.

  • Right-size the model

    The most expensive model on every step is a habit. Scripts take the routine work, and a smaller model, sometimes one on your own machines, does the rest.

The long version is a book.

I also wrote Unauthorized Intelligence, a 352-page book on owning your AI stack.

About the bookAuthor page on Amazon (opens in a new tab)
The cover of Unauthorized Intelligence: Your AI Answers to Nobody, 2025-2026 Edition.

Now the short version.

A 20-minute call, no deck needed. Bring one piece of work your team keeps fixing by hand, and by the end you'll know whether I'm the right person.

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Or follow along: @s1mbolik on X (opens in a new tab) and Simon Martin on LinkedIn (opens in a new tab).