The design work I led at Ziina won a UX Design Award and Red Dot.
Anton Badashov
I lead design teams and stay hands-on across product, brand, and code. I was Ziina’s first employee and Head of Design, led Careem’s rider experience, and now lead design at Escargot.
- Red Dot
- UX Design Award
- Top 1 Free App UAE
- Best App Ru
Escargot
Head of Design · 2025–present
Escargot helps people stay close through greeting cards. I lead product strategy and design across the app and website, and build features in code.
People started coming back more often to send cards and use reminders. Monthly revenue grew 9.2× as we redesigned and expanded the product.
The app starts with the people you care about. I designed it around reminders, sending cards, and keeping the ones you receive.
The website makes it easy to send a first card; the app handles reminders and relationship history. I set that direction and built the first storefront.
Remix lets you change an artist-designed card with AI. I designed the flow and built the native effects that respond as your card is generated.
Ziina
Head of Design · 2020–2025
I joined Ziina as its first employee and built the design team. I led product design, research, and brand as we moved from payments between friends to helping small businesses get paid.
By September 2024, Ziina had reached $300M in annualized payment volume and 40% month-on-month revenue growth, and raised a $22M Series A.
Testing kept us focused on the basics: sending money, requesting it, and knowing where it went. We kept transactions private by default.
We kept personal and business payments in one app. For businesses, I focused on the essentials: create an order, get paid, and track unpaid orders.
Businesses were already selling in chat. I designed ZiiBoard so they could create a payment link from their keyboard, without switching apps.
First-named inventor on the published US patent application.
Ziina 360 – payment links, online checkout, and in-person payments in one app. Product overview, 2024.
A product film introducing Tap to Pay on Ziina.
3D artwork and motion for Ziina’s NFT.
A short promotional film for Ziina at Comic Con.
Motion, 3D, and brand work I designed and art directed at Ziina.
3D illustrations built in Spline for Ziina’s website.
Careem
Senior Product Designer → Design Lead · 2018–2020
I led design for Careem’s rider app, used by 4M+ people a month across 14 countries. My work covered booking, pickup, and the ride itself.
I also designed the new Careem Bus app from fieldwork in Cairo to launch, prototyped the Super App vision, and led Careem for Business design.
We rode buses in Cairo and interviewed customers. Stops were hard to find, and boarding took too long. That shaped the redesign.
I redesigned ride updates so people could see what was happening after booking. In our experiment, clearer status messages reduced cancellations by 0.84 percentage points.
I designed 360° previews to help riders find their stop, and prototyped a boarding pass that could be checked with sound.
Awards & recognition
Patent
US application
First-named inventor on the published US patent application behind ZiiBoard.
Ziina topped the UAE App Store’s overall free chart in May 2025, ahead of ChatGPT and Temu.
#1
Free app · UAE
My essay Design Principles Behind Great Products reached around 200K views. It’s been translated into Korean and Chinese, published in Russian, used in a university course, and cited in academic research.
More work & experiments
Products, prototypes, and experiments with motion and 3D.
Anecdote.ai’s product demo for Y Combinator.
A link-in-bio page for musicians to share their music.
Poster experiments made with Midjourney and After Effects.