Tanya Donska

Tanya doesn't publish her age, which is both a personal choice and, frankly, none of Google's business. The work is ten years deep if that helps.

If you're here for that, the autobiography section is probably as personal as it gets.

A UI/UX design agency without the agency part. Embedded inside SaaS products that mostly work, fixing the flows that have been on the roadmap long enough that nobody remembers who put them there. Senior design, no agency overhead, no discovery phase. In your Figma by week one.

Engineering, actually. The illustration happened in the margins – literally. She drew through most of the degree, which probably should have been a signal. It wasn't, until later.

Game design. She spent two years building interfaces for worlds that didn't exist yet – systems before stories, logic before aesthetics. A founder saw the work and hired her for a product role before she had a name for what she was doing. The name came later. The approach didn't change much.

Yes. Not the terminology, but the logic. Where is the load going. What's holding weight it wasn't built for. What fails first when something goes wrong. It's the same question, different material.

Yes. Not the terminology – the logic. Where is the load going. What's holding weight it wasn't designed for. What fails first when something breaks. Same question, different material. The engineering degree turned out to be useful in ways the degree programme definitely didn't intend.

Digital, actually. They ended up as a blog category. The patterns that kept showing up, written down before the next product made the same mistake. It's called #Not_My_Type

She doesn't soften the observation. She's careful about the moment. There's a difference between saying something true at the wrong time and saying something true when the room is ready to hear it. Ten years of reading rooms. It's the actual skill nobody teaches.