About

Daniel Wu

Open to new opportunities: full-time roles in enterprise / B2B product design or design systems. Around two years of UI/UX experience, focused on making complex systems understandable — currently at Horizon Information, with work spanning a 250+ page enterprise system and an internal design system.

From Sculpture to Interfaces

My design training started with materials. During my M.F.A. in sculpture, I independently staged three solo exhibitions — handling everything myself, from the creative plan, material preparation, and venue coordination to promotion design and on-site production. Before that, I restored prehistoric fossils and built steel sculptures in an artist’s studio: welding, cutting, grinding, polishing.

What those years gave me isn’t something vague like “a sense of aesthetics”, but two concrete habits: the ability to plan and execute a complete project from zero, and a respect for the limits of materials — steel won’t bend to your imagination, and users won’t always follow the flow you designed.

After moving into UI/UX, I found interface design surprisingly similar to sculpture: both are about finding form within constraints. The difference is that an interface’s materials are information, flows, and human attention.

How I Work

I believe a good product is more than its screens — it’s holistic thinking about user behavior, workflow efficiency, and business goals.

At Horizon Information Inc., my work spans design and implementation: I take requirements from PMs, discuss and design, then build the front-end markup myself before handing it to the development team for integration. Because design and markup come from the same person, engineers can stay focused on the framework, data, and system security — it’s my most tangible contribution to the team.

Since 2026, I’ve brought AI into my workflow — not to replace my own thinking, but to speed up hypothesis validation and let projects and products iterate fast:

  • Led the internal prompt generator for the HZN design system — PMs and designers generate interactive HTML prototypes directly, which designers then refine before handing off to the development team
  • Use Claude Code to turn ideas into clickable, testable products instead of leaving them in Figma — TrustGuard, for instance, breaks agentic-AI trust into three interactive scenario demos, taken from research to front-end single-handedly
  • Hand repetitive work to machines — eagle for inspiration gathering, auto-reporter for news digests — keeping my time and attention on judgment

But I work with AI under one rule: let it speed up output, but keep the decisions and the verification in my own hands.

  • I own the architecture, then debate it with AI. In the HZN design system — why the AI is told to “read the repo itself” instead of having rules pasted into chat, or why PMs can only generate single-page prototypes — every call was settled by argument.
  • I give AI one source of truth and build verification gates. A single cheatsheet.md is the only thing the AI generates from; the Theme Studio’s built-in WCAG contrast check blocks unreadable color combinations; Bitmap Dream pins its output with 186 tests, so the same URL always returns the same image.
  • I re-judge the aesthetics of what AI generates. Design-oriented AI skills are still template application at heart, so their output tends to look alike; my background in art lets me push one step past that generated baseline into something more distinctive — the dithered pixel illustrations in Quantum Cuisine, the 3D fluid interactions in Tori Art Portfolio.
  • I’m honest about AI’s limits. TrustGuard’s user research was AI-simulated — and for now, it still can’t replace real interviews.
  • I verify hypotheses by building them. Ideas don’t stay in Figma; I implement them with Claude Code into prototypes you can click and test — the fastest way to verify an interface is to make it actually operable.

Skills & Tools

Design — Figma (component systems, variants, prototyping), design system construction (design tokens, documentation), wireframes and information architecture, Photoshop, Illustrator

Implementation — HTML / CSS / SCSS (independent markup and RWD), Bootstrap, Tailwind, programmatic design systems (token sync, component libraries), Git version control

AI collaboration — Claude Code, MCP, Claude Skills, prompt design, research simulation and rapid prototyping

Experience

Horizon Information Inc.・UI/UX Designer (Full-time) 2024.07 – Present｜UI design and markup, UX optimization, internal AI tool development

Artist Studio・Artist Assistant (Part-time) 2020.11 – 2023.07｜Steel sculpture fabrication and exhibition installation: welding, cutting, grinding, polishing

Mr. Fossil Co.・Fossil Restorer (Part-time) 2019.05 – 2020.10｜Prehistoric fossil preparation, replica painting, display mount fabrication

National Taiwan University of Arts・M.F.A. in Sculpture 2020.09 – 2023.06｜Independently staged three solo exhibitions during graduate school