Overview
A freelance project: Olav Svenson is a Korean vintage goods brand built around a Scandinavian-inspired identity. I designed the visual system and built the e-commerce site, from the UI to the code running it.
Year
2026
Role
UX/UI + Dev (100%)
Services
Vintage E-commerce
Duration
3 Months
Goal
A considered brand needed a store to match
Olav Svenson sells vintage furniture and objects, each with its own history. The site needed to carry that same care, and it needed to actually work: real accounts, a real cart, and checkout that ships.
Mood Board
I looked through a handful of vintage furniture sites, print layouts, and minimal e-commerce examples, then narrowed them down to the tone Olav Svenson needed.
Design system
From there, I built a color and typography system to keep the shop feeling consistent across every screen.
With the system in place, I built the actual UI components: buttons, icons, the cart, and product cards that make up the shop.
Designing for every screen
With the design system and components in place, I designed responsively across breakpoints, so the shop adapts to different devices and screen sizes.
Build
Vibe coding from design system to working store
I used AI-assisted vibe coding to implement the design system in code, then built the shop screen by screen around it.
Lessons Learned
Designing inside someone else's taste
This was the first project where I designed for someone else's brand instead of my own instincts, and built it from nothing. There was no existing site to work from, just a name and a mood. Before touching a single color or font, I had to figure out what "considered" meant to Olav Svenson, not to me.
That habit stuck. Now I start every freelance project by studying whatever references, name, mood, a handful of images the client gives me, before opening Figma, instead of designing first and justifying it after.