Ches Wajda

I work best at the intersection of product design, brand mark design, and typography. Leveraging all three in concert with various technologies helps an interface’s touch points line up — a mark that reinforces the product, and vice versa.

Some of the work has outlasted its moment. At LinkedIn we co-invented the “profile completeness” indicator, which has since become a standard part of onboarding UX — taught at Stanford’s d.school. YouTube’s “Play” button is now part of its logo. YouTube’s visual design, player, and “Play” button were acquired by the V&A Museum in London in 2026.

Today I take on product, brand, and type commissions through my studio NonFriction, and work at AI video startup EyeTell as a designer.

I was extremely fortunate to have Cathy Bogigian (Lyons Township HS, La Grange, IL) as my commercial art teacher in high school. She lined up my first professional illustration gigs (at 17), working for New City in Chicago under Brian and Kathy Hieggelke. Those turned into summer design internships through college, opening up the city — and the world — to me.

I was also lucky to study under Robb Springfield and Ken Carls (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign). I worked my way through school at the Daily Illini, alongside Jean LaChat, Ed Dy, Nina Slodki, Michelle Latimer, Dan Bernard, Dave King, and Dave Eggers, mentored by Mary Cory and Kit Donahue.

I was equally fortunate to be introduced to the web by a newspaper guy — Jack McNeely — in the early days at a New Jersey newspaper. I built my first websites in 1994 and bought my first domains in 1995. My friend John Decker and I worked on a “startup” (before we knew the word), making Virtual Home Tours (vht.com) in 1995. We sold it for nothing a year later.

I got to design at Philly.com under Fred Mann and John McQuiggan, working with Rajiv Pant, Jennifer Musser, Ranjit Bhatnagar, and Kellie Hanna.

Then I was hired to do Visual Design at E-TRADE, back in its heyday, and did a lot of great work with Jesse Ellenbogen, Hetal Soni, Britton Holland, Kevin Yan, Dolly Parikh, Pam Kramer, Kat Meyers, Frank Gutierrez, Ming Wu, and Rajneel Ganjoo. I worked with some of the best people ever, and eventually came to run the Design team.

I came to know Reid Hoffman and became LinkedIn’s first design hire, working under Allen Blue and doing amazing work with Chris Saccheri, Josh Elman, Scott Schlegel, Sara Imbach, Greg Cervelli, and Clary Alward.

Chad Hurley recruited me to be YouTube’s first Visual Designer, where I did great work with Chris (Form) Miller, Christina Brodbeck, Yu Pan, Carol Gunby, Maryrose Dutton, Omar Lee, Dave Halloran, and Gunthar Hartwig.

I’ve been a foundational designer at many other startups since.

Along the way I’ve been privileged to mentor design teams myself.

For most of my recent career I didn’t have a portfolio. From the 2010s into the 2020s, work came through in-person presentations, word of mouth, and LinkedIn. Still, a web designer with no website was... odd. I knew it.

I’d stopped coding a decade before, outpaced by specialization in web development. The publishing platforms never offered more than templates with some options. They sucked, frankly. But after COVID, the lack of an online presence caught up with me as designer. I surely lost out on many gigs for not having a portfolio.

Recently, tools like Claude Design have finally let me show the work the way I intended to present it. Not that this is any high design(!), it’s just tailored to how I prefer to tell my story and present work. Know that this is largely an archive of what I’ve done — more a gift to my younger self, than any pitch for any new work.

I write this feeling strongly that while of course AI tools are changing design, there’s still a lot of design to do with it. And I’m curious to see where it goes.