I’m Callum Flack—a design engineer and product leader with over 20 years of experience. I design and build beautiful hypertext products that work in the blink of an eye, creating the most valued currency—trust.
My background in design informs everything I do. I started my career in branding and graphic design in 1999. I’ve been designing user interfaces since 2008. I started coding in 2011—a natural progression.
Read about the work and team I’m after here.
Here’s my CV. Please read my case studies. Some highlights:
- I worked at Vana, a San Francisco-based start-up from 2022 to 2024 as engineer and designer. We built a viral generative AI app before ChatGPT existed.
- I built Cleared from initial commit in 2019 through to its sale in 2022. I assembled and lead its engineering team, and designed and built the app.
- I ran my own agency 2015 to 2020 for Australian and US clients, remote from Cairns. I planned, designed, built and managed projects from brief to launch.
- In the 00s, I did brand design at Saatchi & Saatchi, London among other places. You can still find my 2000-era brand work in Australian supermarkets.
As a frontend engineer, I’m fluid with React and Typescript. I’m particularly interested in LLMs, design systems and real-time, local-first systems.
As a designer, I use high-res tools such as Figma to derive design systems and assets, or low-res tools such as TLDraw or whiteboards to figure out product flows.
I’m competent as a designer or engineer and I love making design real in code. Some people call this mix “design engineering”.
The value of good design is only realised if you have an engineer capable of discerning the details in code (or if you’re lucky, they’re one and the same). Jim Nielsen
Code as design tool. A decade as graphic designer and a decade as frontend engineer gives me unique agency: I use code as a design tool to get as close as possible to the nitty gritty of the medium. It is simply a much faster feedback loop.
Materialising ideas. Neither code nor design is the point. Materialising ideas is. I think there is no substitute for the journey of forming personal taste by paying attention to the world and learning the trade of making ideas real.
Tempo. Knowing the tempo of work is underrated. Are we testing a hypothesis? Drafting it until it’s obvious and simple? Running downhill towards a feature release? I keep a tempo in mind at all times.
Teamwork. I believe that scenius is a big secret hidden in plain sight: shared intuitions and mutual at-handedness within a team creates the speed which “prioritises parsimony and substraction in the solution space”, as Collison says.
I collect music of all kinds and ran multiple vinyl record labels with friends between 2007 and 2013, for which I designed (or rebuilt) all the record covers.
I read books and watch films voraciously; Gerald Murnane’s “Border Districts” or Jonathon Glazer’s “Under The Skin” are current favourites. My favourite artist is either Agnes Martin or Joseph Cornell.
I’ve lived in 3 countries and 8 cities. Home is now tropical Cairns, Australia with my wife and children.