About Ivan

Hello there — I’m Ivan, a Creative Director based in Cape Town, South Africa and working everywhere.

For nearly 20 years I’ve been helping brands figure out what they want to say, how they should look and, most importantly, how to make the bloody thing work. I’ve worked in award-winning ad agencies, inside some of South Africa’s biggest financial companies and alongside some pretty iconic sports brands. These days, I work independently, bringing strategy, creative direction and design together in whatever combination a project actually needs.

Sometimes that means joining an existing team.
Sometimes it means leading one.
Sometimes it means figuring out the problem before anyone starts designing.
And increasingly, it means exploring what AI and new creative technologies make possible.

I’m interested in the space between thinking and making; where a strategy becomes an idea, an idea becomes a system and a system becomes something people can actually use. My practice covers:

Brand
Identity development, brand systems and guidelines: big or small; it's always about systems.

Digital
UI/UX, digital experiences and design systems: usually as an expression of brand.

Information
Information design, infographics and visual storytelling for making complex things clear.

Creative
Creative direction, concept development and turning promising ideas into hard-working ones.

Illustration & iconography
Illustration, icon systems and all the little visual details that make a brand feel like itself.

AI & experimentation
Exploring new creative workflows, visual possibilities and ways of working with AI - with a healthy suspicion of anything described as “the future of creativity”.

Although what I do is flexible, my ambition isn't. I'm here to help make better things, together.