Meet Jamal

Jamal is a Belgium brand designer known for helping clients develop innovative visual languages for their narratives. His approach prioritizes the user's experience, beginning each project with empathy to guide his creative direction—before he even sketches or launches a design tool. “It always feels like embarking on an adventure,” he says.

The challenge

Expanding from Branding to Web Design

Over the past five years, Jamal's scope of work has broadened significantly. His clients increasingly rely on him to extend their newly developed brands across various touchpoints, with web design becoming a frequent request.

“I didn’t use to do much development or engineering. I do know a bit of HTML and CSS but not enough to really make a website from scratch without any help from W3school.”

That was when he began looking for a tool to help. Soon, he found tools that are easy enough, but often end up limiting his creative expression. He found himself loosing time, and getting frustrated with the rigidity of these tools.

Realizing these tools fell short, he experimented with a different breed of tools - tools advertised to be more powerful. He came in hopeful, thinking this will finally be what’s needed to translate his brand work to new client touchpoints. However, these too were inadequate.

“Webflow for me was like extremely complex. For example, there is classes to every single thing you add. The UI wasn’t exactly friendly either… to me it felt like the difference between Figma and old Adobe apps. It was a very heavy tool.”

The journey

Discovering Power in Simplicity

Jamal discovered STUDIO during its beta phase and immediately saw its potential. “It gave me a very light, efficient workflow type of sensation,” he recalls. The app, balancing power with simplicity for designers, unlocked a new level of creative control.

“I can use STUDIO as if I’m using just any design software, and at the same time I still know what’s going on code wise. I felt in control.”

Jamal went on to share one of his projects, men-tors, a Belgian organization promoting mental well-being among boys, men, and fathers through community events. The website needs to showcase the new brand, and needs to be functional to feature the constantly updated events.

Jamal started designing in STUDIO’s Design Editor using drag-and-drop tools inspired by the new brand style. In the events section, he used cards with rich imagery to showcase dates and details. For interactivity, he applied conditional styles to create custom hover effects with just a few clicks. Finally, using the “list” feature, Jamal could duplicate event cards from one master version, which then auto-updates every copy whenever he edits the master.

This was an instance, Jamal recounts, where STUDIO’s designer-friendly workflow brings power, ease, and ultimately cuts production time.

The impact

New Deliverables and Possibilities Unlocked

With STUDIO, Jamal offers expanded services and deliverables to his clients. He is now able to take the brand language he composed together with the client, and be a part of executing and rolling out in the real world with web destinations.

Check out his portfolio here, and his work with men.tors here.