About
Fourteen years of building the web, and still shipping.
I’m Hans Allí, a digital design consultant in Manila. I studied Information Design at the Ateneo de Manila University, then spent the next fourteen years designing and building, mostly for the web: UI and UX, information architecture, content strategy, and the front-end build that turns a design file into something people actually use.
Before any of that, I built things with my hands. Lego first, then model kits, the biggest a 1/60 Wing Zero my parents gave me. At home I tinkered with our old Macs, where I lost hours to the software and to games like Lode Runner. Those were the first interfaces I loved, and, though I didn’t have the word for it, my first training in systems: you plan before you cut, and you build in an order that holds.
I started in a web agency, spent a stretch at an app agency designing consumer products and enterprise tools on iOS and Android, then came back to the web to co-found Dthree Digital, a Manila web consultancy I lead as managing director. Consulting on both has never really stopped. Ten years and five hundred projects in, the range still keeps us honest: a university one quarter, a global nonprofit the next, a national EV campaign after that. Different rooms, same job. Understand the people who will use and maintain the thing, then build it clear, fast, and made to last.
The throughline is that I care about what happens after launch. Portfolios show launch day; I optimize for month eight. Sites the client can run without calling anyone. Stacks chosen for whoever answers at 2am. Speed treated as a feature, because it is one.
Lately that has meant a product of my own, and it brought me back to where I started: a toy. Hele is a wind-up carousel music box for small children, mine included, and it’s now on the App Store. I designed and built it with AI assisting on the engineering and as a sounding board.
What made or broke it was still design. The interface had to make sense to a two-year-old who can’t read and to a parent at the end of a long day. It came down to one gesture: turn the key, watch it play, and the feel lived in details like the carousel slowing as the spring runs out.
How I work
Judgment first. The expensive mistake is building the wrong thing well.
Ship the real thing. A plain version live beats an ambitious version in progress.
Build for the editor and the maintainer, not the launch photo.
AI speeds up the work, I make the decisions. I build with it daily and review everything like a stranger wrote it.