Irfan Rafeek
Product Designer, design systems · Bengaluru, India
“Irfan thinks in systems the way most designers think in screens. We overlapped at Quintype on Bold, and years later he was the one who saw that a clinical note should work like a publishing editor, made of blocks. That idea became the spine of Nimo. If you care about tokens, theming or how a design system actually gets adopted, read his Condé Nast work.”
How we know each other
Irfan and I were product designers at Quintype at the same time, working on the publishing platform used by newsrooms like Fortune India and National Herald. He co-led the Bold CMS redesign, designed the Ahead page builder and helped build Quintype’s design system. We also both worked on rethinking subscription flows for publishers.
Today we’re building Nimo together, a clinical note system for Indian clinics. His years in publishing are where Nimo’s core idea came from: treat a clinical note like a document made of blocks, not a fixed medical form.
His work
- Condé Nast, 2020 – 2025. Principal Product Designer on Verso, the design system behind more than 20 brands including Vogue, The New Yorker, Wired and Architectural Digest. He reworked its token and theming architecture so sub-brands and components could be themed, and his spacing tokens were adopted by 22 brands.
- Ambo, 2025 – now. Founding designer at an employee-advocacy startup, taking it from concept to a multi-workflow content platform in six months.
- Impostor Games, 2026. A browser party game he designed and built with AI-assisted design-to-code. It reached players in more than 40 countries in its first month.
- Before that: Quintype, YourStory, and front-end work at Red Panthers.
Worth reading
- Color theming for Condé Nast’s Verso design system
- Spacing components in design systems, on why most teams get spacing backwards
- Revamping conventional subscription flows, from our Quintype days
- His writing on design systems, accessibility and building with AI