Kiara Vong

WASHINGTON, DC Currently @

I build the layer everything else sits on: design systems, internal platforms, the tools engineers open forty times a day and never think about. Because I write the code and draw the thing, I’m usually the one asking whether we need this component at all and then building it anyway. Off the clock, I paint badly and lose, regularly, to a chess engine I wrote myself.

my cats, lyra & goose,
senior prompt engineers

Lyra and Goose, two cats, at one open laptop with Claude on the screen

Life imitates art?

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A photograph taken at Mitaka, Tokyo Printemps a Pont-Aven by Ernest de Chamaillard

Studio Ghibli Museum

INFO : Mitaka, Tokyo, Mar 2025

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Printemps à Pont-Aven

INFO : E. de Chamaillard, 1900

See the work

A design system reference page: colour ramps, a type scale, a component grid and a migration checklist
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No. 03
UI Consistency
Capital One2026

A dozen local dialects of the same interface. Audited it, designed the shared layer underneath, and cut the 208-file change into ten pull requests a human could actually review.

A homepage rearranging itself as the selected persona changes
Coming soon!
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No. 04
Persona Homepage
Capital OneUpcoming

A homepage that reorders itself around who is looking at it. Designing the customisation model, the defaults that have to be right before anyone touches a setting, and how a page earns the right to move.

Animal Crossing island generator

A procedural 3D island built tile by tile with wave function collapse, the same technique games like Bad North use to grow coherent worlds from a small set of hand-modelled pieces.

Dorms @ Brown

A housing-decision app for the lottery: every dorm on campus with photos, floor plans and peer reviews, plus a quiz that narrows thirty dorms to a shortlist. React, Java and Firebase.

Stardew Valley companion

Look up any villager's favourite gifts, click around town to learn what each building does. No framework and no build step, styled closely enough to feel like it belongs in the game.

UI/UX case studies

An earlier portfolio built around research and process rather than final screenshots: each piece walks through the problem, what was tried, and what actually shipped.

Chess engine

A playable board with an opponent behind it: move generation, alpha-beta search, and an evaluation that is honest about how much it does not know.

Pac-Man

Pac-Man rebuilt in the browser, four ghosts included. They share one movement system and differ only in the tile each one aims at, which is a cheap way to buy four personalities.