Joneil's Digital Corner
Product designer and strategist with 5+ years of experience in early-startups, B2B Saas, enterprise, and consumer platforms.
Hi, I am Joneil.
Product Designer focused on clarity and real-world use
I was born in Manila, raised in Illinois, and Chicago has been home for a while now. Beijing and Seoul got their own chapter along the way, back when I was studying international relations. Before design, I spent about three years producing podcasts, running 10+ shows and learning what it takes to keep a team, a schedule, and a story together.
Design was the natural next step. Same instinct for structure and story, pointed at products instead of episodes. These days I work end to end: flows, information architecture, design systems, and the small decisions that make software feel less like software.
Most of that has happened inside startups and small teams, where resources are thin, everything moves at once, and everyone wears a dozen hats. I am good at walking into that and making it make sense. Usually that means finding the real problem before anyone builds anything, then designing the thing that actually solves it.
What is
halo studio?
Halo is short for halo-halo, a Filipino dessert whose name literally means "mix-mix."
It's made by bringing together different ingredients, textures, and flavors into something greater than any one ingredient on its own.
That's also how I think about building products.
Great products don't come from design working in isolation. They come from bringing together product strategy, design, engineering, customer insight, and business goals—and finding the right balance between all of them.
I created Halo Studio to work in that space.
To bring the right pieces together, make sense of complexity, and help teams build products that are better than any one discipline could create alone.
The values
behind my work
Curiosity
I dig into why something isn’t working before I design anything. Understanding the problem is most of the work.
Clarity
I make complicated things easy to follow. Structure, flows, and the right words, all doing their jobs.
Adaptability
My path here wasn’t a straight line, and startup work rarely is either. I adjust quickly without losing the thread.