I design the parts of products nobody screenshots.

Kruševo Picks

Kruševo Picks is an NBA bracket prediction app I built for a group of friends. I designed it, wrote the product decisions, set up the database, and deployed it. Start to finish, solo, with AI writing the code under my direction. Stack is vanilla JavaScript with Firebase Realtime Database for state, the ESPN API for live game data (admin-only, cached to stay under the free tier), and Netlify for hosting. The interaction model is cascading picks across bracket rounds, with a conviction-bonus scoring system that rewards confidence as much as accuracy. Scoring maxes out at 64 points per user. The leaderboard gets a small hero treatment, with a share-to-PNG champion card at the end of the tournament.

The project didn't start as an app. It started as an attempt to get an AI-generated bracket image for our group, which turned out underwhelming. The fallback was the usual: social media comments, manually tracking who picked what. That wasn't enough, so the real question became whether I could actually build the interactive thing, using AI for the code, with every architectural and product decision staying mine. This is the answer. I made the infrastructure decisions, designed the data model, owned the auth layer (4-digit PIN), and shipped it. For a designer whose specialty is the structural layer, being able to direct AI to execute on that layer is the differentiator. This is that proof, not that claim.

Token Payment System

Some festivals on the Upped Events platform ran into a specific regulatory reality: several US states require alcohol at events to flow through a centralized point of sale, rather than through individual vendors handling cash. Michigan was the strictest example, with a sell-at-cost rule on alcohol that effectively mandated a token economy. The industry-standard solution to this regulatory shape is tokens: attendees buy tokens from the operator with real money, then redeem them at vendor stalls for drinks. The solution itself wasn't new. What was new was making it work cleanly across a three-surface event management platform where every item, every checkout, and every point-of-sale transaction already lived.

I led the design across all three affected surfaces. In the admin panel, the item-creation flow had to support dual pricing: a fiat value and a token value for every product a vendor wanted to sell. In the attendee app, tokens became a first-class wallet concept, with a dedicated purchase flow for buying tokens before arriving at the venue. At the POS (running on Upped's custom hardware deployed to events), the payment selector had to handle the new token-based transactions alongside cash and card.

The feature shipped and was used at real events. It's some of the clearest evidence in my portfolio of what it looks like to design across product boundaries, where a single decision at the admin level has immediate consequences for attendee and point-of-sale experiences downstream.