Vlad Burca

My Path

15+ years across four continents

My career started in Iasi, Romania, doing freelance web design while still in university. The early work was rough. I was teaching myself typography from books, reverse-engineering CSS layouts from sites I admired, and slowly building a portfolio that was heavy on experimentation and light on strategy. But those years gave me something I still rely on: the ability to build things from nothing, fast.

After graduating with a degree in New Media & Online Advertising from Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iasi, I moved into agency work. Spent time at several studios in Romania where I picked up the pace and pressure of client-facing design. Tight deadlines, unclear briefs, stakeholders with conflicting opinions. It taught me to stop treating design as self-expression and start treating it as problem-solving under constraints.

Then CyberGhost happened. VPN interfaces in 2018 were built by engineers for engineers. Server lists, protocol settings, connection logs in monospace text. My job was to make privacy feel simple. We stripped the interface down to its bare essentials and built an experience where non-technical users could protect themselves without reading a manual. That project changed how I thought about design entirely. The interesting work isn't making something look better. It's closing the gap between what a product can do and what people actually experience when they use it.

Work

What I actually do day to day

At Product Rocket, I lead the creative and visual direction for every project we take on. That means I'm the one deciding how a product should feel before we get into how it should work. Brand identity, visual systems, interaction patterns, motion design, presentation layers. All of it goes through me.

But "creative lead" is a title that can mean anything, so let me be specific. On any given week, I might be building a Design System from scratch for a broadcasting company like LiveU (120+ components, cross-platform consistency, 60% faster design velocity). Or redesigning a dashboard for an analytics platform like Anylyze where users described the old interface as "drinking from a firehose." Or crafting a brand identity for a restaurant chain, an NGO, or a university.

What connects all of it is cleaning up visual mess. Most products I walk into have accumulated design debt the same way codebases accumulate technical debt. Colors used inconsistently. Typography that drifts between screens. Components that do the same thing but look different depending on which team built them. I fix that, and then I build systems so it doesn't happen again.

I also handle all the Figma architecture and prototyping. The goal is high-fidelity prototypes that developers can actually build from. Too many prototypes look great in a stakeholder presentation and completely fall apart during handoff. After years of sitting next to engineering teams, I've come to think of a prototype as a conversation starter between design and development. If it doesn't make that conversation easier, it hasn't done its job.

Approach

How I think about creative work

I don't believe in design for design's sake. Every visual decision should earn its place. If a gradient doesn't improve comprehension, it's decoration. If an animation doesn't guide attention, it's distraction. I've seen too many products where the design team optimized for Dribbble likes instead of user outcomes.

Speaking of Dribbble, I've been active there for years. Got featured, built a following, received invites and recognition from the community. But the most useful thing Dribbble taught me was the difference between work that impresses designers and work that helps users. They overlap less than you'd think.

My process is straightforward. I start with constraints: brand guidelines, technical limitations, accessibility requirements, business goals. Constraints are where creativity actually starts for me. Then I explore broadly. Multiple directions, different moods, varying levels of boldness. I make a point of presenting options that are genuinely different from each other. Three versions of the same idea with different button colors is a waste of everyone's time. Once we pick a direction, I go deep. Every state, every edge case, every responsive breakpoint.

One thing I'm particular about: consistency. I'd rather have a product with a simple, well-executed visual language than one with ten different "creative" solutions competing for attention. Good design systems are boring in the best way. They get out of the user's way.

Beyond Work

What shapes my perspective

I co-founded Product Rocket with Gianina because we kept running into the same problem from different angles. She'd identify what users needed through research, and I'd figure out how to make it tangible on screen. We'd been doing it informally for years before we made it official.

Working across markets (Romania, wider Europe, the US, Israel, UAE) gave me something that pure design skill can't. Cultural expectations around interfaces vary more than most designers realize. What feels "clean" in Scandinavia can feel "empty" in the Middle East. What reads as "professional" in the US can feel "cold" in Southern Europe. I think about that stuff now. It's part of the brief, even when the client doesn't mention it.

Outside of client work, I keep up with design tooling, AI-assisted workflows, and frontend technologies. I completed the Product Psychology Masterclass by Growth.Design in 2025, which deepened how I think about the cognitive side of interface decisions. I'm not chasing trends. I just find that the more I understand about what's possible (and what's expensive) on the engineering side, the better my design decisions get. That was true when I started, and it's even more true now that the tools are changing so fast.