Călin Balea's Linkedin Analytics

Remember this giveaway I did? $10,000 in value for free. Some people missed out. Make sure you're not. A few folks reached out to me asking if I can still consider them. Sorry, projects are already underway. I'll do other giveaways in the future. Make sure you don't miss the next one. Turn on notifications! 🔔 Go to my profile, click the bell icon, and select "All". Why? The LinkedIn algo doesn't really know what "most relevant" means. PS: Rest assured, I won't spam you. I'm not one of those LinkedIn influencers that posts every day for "consistency". I post when I have something useful to share.

This is over $10.000 in value. Don't sleep on it. Here's the creative process if I pick your project: 1. A meet-up to align on project goals and strategy 2. Alignment on brand identity. This means either familiarizing myself with your brand or doing a quick branding exercise to define how you want your brand to be perceived. 3. Mood board. This is when words become visuals. We'll translate brand attributes and persona into a visual direction. This sets the tone for the look and feel. 4. Content outline and wireframing. This is when we focus on visitor journey and optimizing for conversion. 5. High-fidelity visual design. The fun stuff. It's time to paint over the wireframes and apply the visual identity of the brand we defined earlier 7. Responsive design to make sure your site looks and works great on all devices. 8. Webflow implementation & QA 9. Go live!

Founders fail because they're very good at pretending to listen to customers without actually listening. 🎤 💥

Remember to be emphatic. What you consider silly BS might feel very real to the other person.

Sarosh is one of the best PMs I worked with. Don't miss out.

New contact modal on contrast.studio 👀 Fun fact: closing the modal also works with Esc key

Articles section coming to Contrast Studio soon. Short, dense, no-BS, practical advice on design for #saas startups. Stay tuned.

Friend list and profile drawer screens.

I see startups screaming they want top 1% talent. If you're not just being hyperbolic... make sure you're also ready to pay top 1% rates.

Brand identity for Uscatzele, a new Romanian healthy snack brand

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Case study coming soon

Why a mid-level designer shouldn’t be your founding designer You wouldn’t hire a mid-level developer as your CTO. Why? Because leading product and technical decisions require experience beyond just writing code. The same applies to design. A junior or mid-level designer might know Figma and make things look good, but a founding designer (or CDO) needs to: ✅ Move fast and deal with uncertainty ✅ Build a brand that resonates with early users ✅ Align design with business goals ✅ Minimize design and tech debt and more A strong founding designer isn’t just pushing pixels—they’re shaping the company’s identity and user experience from the ground up. Otherwise? A disjointed brand, wasted dev resources, and costly redesigns down the line. Hire for impact, not just output or cost.

Thank you everyone for participating. Projects have been kicked off. I'll start posting results in a few weeks. Stay tuned.

Don't get it twisted. AI tools won't turn someone who doesn't know what they're doing into someone who does.

Contrast Studio 2.0 is here 🥳 And I come bearing gifts. In implementing the site I needed a couple of snippets of custom code for some styling. You might need those too sometime. 1. Changing the background and text color of the nav bar when it scrolls over a specific section. It detects the color of that section and updates it. 2. Changing the color of the page when reaching a specific point in the height of a section. See this in action on my case study page. Scroll to the bottom. Stuff like this could also be done with GSAP but for simple use cases, this works. Link to the code snippets in the comments. Enjoy.

I’ll only do this once! I’ll make you a *free* website. No joke. No scam. No junk work. Why? I’ve been making websites in Webflow for years but now it’s time to make it official. I’m getting my Webflow partner certification! Part of the process is to submit 3 sites I’ve built in Webflow. The problem? Most sites I’ve made in the past startups are no longer live. They’ve been edited or removed after the startups got sold. I need new ones. So this is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to get my help for free! A few ground rules: - I’ll design and build the site - No tight deadlines - You’ll need to allocate enough time to work with me. I expect to hear back in max 24 hours when I need feedback. - You need to publish the site on your domain when it’s done (Don’t worry, I’ll make sure you’re happy with it) How it works: Post a comment below and tell me about your project. Pitch me. Why? I’ll pick the ones that seem most interesting. I want to do work that’ll look great in my portfolio, not just junk volume. Help me out and I’ll help you out. — PS: Reshare if you think people in your network would be interested

I just got off a call with a founder. Reminder 1: Don't be a solution in search of a problem. Reminder 2: Don't force-feed AI to your users. I get it... Everyone's excited by AI. VC capital is pouring in. Founders are scrambling to develop AI-powered apps because... those are the only ones getting funded. The user? They just care about their problem, not AI. AI is not the answer to everything. In many cases, it's a distraction. Focus on the customer's pain point! AI might be part of the solution. Or not. That's fine. It doesn't have to be.