“Can you just make it
look nicer?”
is a question about stage two.
Almost every request for visual polish is really a structural problem wearing a colour palette. Our designers work the ladder from the top, hand over something engineers can build, and stay on the Virtus payroll while they do it.
One screen, five stages, roughly three weeks
Every expensive decision is made in the first two panels, where changing your mind costs an afternoon. Clients who insist on starting at stage four pay for the same decisions later, in code.
The problem, in one sentence
“Assessors cannot tell which of 300 claims to open first.” Written before anything is drawn, and agreed with the people who do the job.
Structure, in grey
Hierarchy, grouping and flow only. Deliberately ugly, because a client who is looking at colour is not looking at whether the flow works.
Content and type
Real labels, real numbers, real edge cases — the long name, the empty state, the twelve-item list. Lorem ipsum hides every layout problem.
Visual design
Colour, spacing, states, motion. Fast, because everything underneath is already settled — and reversible for the same reason.
The component, handed over
Tokens, variants, states and behaviour documented in Figma, mapped to what your engineers will actually build. Not a picture of a button.
What separates a designer from a picture of a design
Ask any candidate to walk you through their last handover file. It tells you more in ten minutes than a portfolio does in an hour.
Tokens, not hex codes
Colour, spacing, radius and type as named tokens that map to your CSS variables or theme file. A rebrand becomes one file, not four hundred screens.
Every state, drawn
Default, hover, focus, active, disabled, loading, error, empty. The five your engineers otherwise invent at 6pm are the five users hit first.
Accessibility decided in design
Contrast checked, focus order defined, touch targets sized, and labels written. Cheaper here by roughly a factor of five.
Responsive rules, not three mockups
What reflows, what wraps, what hides, and at which breakpoints — stated as rules so the in-between sizes are not guesswork.
A component that already exists
Before designing anything new, they check whether the system already answers it. The best design work of the week is often a deletion.
Three bands
Design is the one role on the bench where a portfolio genuinely tells you most of what you need. We send three, with the caveats on each stated plainly.
Mid-level
3–5 yrs$26–34/hrDesigns screens and flows within an existing system. Strong in Figma, still building judgement about research.
Senior
5–8 yrs$34–42/hrOwns a product area, runs the research, and is the person who says the sentence in stage one out loud.
Lead / Systems
8+ yrs$42–58/hrOwns the design system and the handover contract with engineering, and works across several squads.
Send us the screen people complain about
We will tell you which rung of the ladder the problem is really on — and it is almost never the one you were about to pay to fix.