About — 01

A designer raised in print,
rebuilt in product.

I'm Muhammed Sarhan. For the last fourteen years I've designed products for teams across three continents — leading with research, shipping with engineers, and believing most software would be better with half as many features.
In short

I started in print at a small Cairo studio, where I learned that spacing is a moral position and that a grid is only as good as the decisions it forces you to make. I fell into product design when a client needed a website, and I never quite found my way back to paper.

Today I work mostly with early-stage teams — sometimes embedded as a founding designer, sometimes brought in for a quarter to lead a redesign or set up a system. I do my best work when the brief is ambiguous and the stakes are real.

I write code well enough to keep engineers honest, run my own research when I can, and care more about how a thing feels than how it photographs. The portfolio is on /work.

Principles

Four things I keep coming back to.

I Restraint over reach

The interface that gets out of the way is the one that gets used. Subtraction is a feature.

II Systems over screens

Any single screen is an artifact of a hundred upstream decisions. Fix the system, not the artifact.

III Craft is the last 10%

Anyone can get to 90%. The work that endures lives in the details no one was asked to fix.

IV Make to think

Decks debate ideas, prototypes test them. I'd rather build the wrong thing fast than discuss the right thing forever.

Where I've worked
  • 2024 — Now Lead Product Designer Independent
  • 2022 — 2024 Founding Designer Quill (YC W23)
  • 2019 — 2022 Senior Product Designer Atlas Health
  • 2016 — 2019 Product Designer Northwind
  • 2014 — 2016 Visual Designer Studio Karam, Cairo
Recognition
  • It's Nice That — Studio of the Day, 2024
  • Awwwards — Site of the Day, 2023
  • Product Hunt — #1 Product of the Day, 2023
  • CSS Design Awards — UI Design Award, 2022

That's the short version. The longer one is over coffee.

Get in touch