About Rakibul Islam

Who is Rakibul Islam?

Rakibul Islam is a product designer and design engineer from Bangladesh, co-founder of the design studio Panze LLC, and the person behind Rakibulism — his own philosophy of designing products, and a life, on purpose rather than by accident.

There are a lot of people named Rakibul Islam. This one is the designer who writes under Rakibulism, runs Panze with a small team, and publishes open-source tools like Agent Skills, Open Icons, and Brands Logo. If you found this page looking for a cricketer, a politician, or one of the ten thousand other people sharing the name, it is not him.

The short version of what he does: he takes a founder's rough idea and turns it into a product people can actually use and actually trust. That means interface design, but it also means the systems underneath — design tokens, component libraries, the front-end code that ships. The line between designing and building is not one he finds useful.

The longer version is that he came to this work sideways, from drawing and writing rather than from a design program, and that shows up in how he works. He is far more interested in why someone hesitates over a button than in whether the button is on trend.

Where did Rakibul Islam grow up, and how did that shape his work?

He grew up in a small village in Bangladesh where money was never a given, drove a rickshaw and worked a shopping-mall job to help keep the household running, and filled notebooks with drawings and more than a thousand poems long before he knew what a wireframe was. Resourcefulness was his first design skill, learned out of necessity rather than in a classroom.

He was born in 2003. By 2011 the family's situation had made improvisation a daily habit — you learn quickly how to make something work with what is actually in front of you, which is most of what design turns out to be. By 2013 he was driving a rickshaw, learning a city and the people in it one fare at a time.

What he had through all of it was a notebook. He drew, and from around 2016 he wrote — over a thousand poems, not as a career plan but because it was the only way he had to process what he watched people do around him. Drawing taught him line, weight, and proportion. Writing taught him to turn observation into an argument. Both are still the core of how he approaches an interface.

In 2019 he was rejected from his Pre-HSC exam. He wrote a poem called 'Golden Deer' on the mathematics paper instead. He is direct about this period rather than tidying it up: he was chasing the idea of buying a laptop, and things got in the way.

By 2020 that combination — drawing, writing, and paying close attention — had turned into product UI/UX design. He never attended design school. He taught himself by watching behaviour: where people get confused, where they get delighted, where friction actually lives, and then by building things to fix whatever was annoying him that week.

How did he become a designer without formal training?

By studying people instead of curricula, and by shipping. He learned design through close observation of behaviour and psychology, then built real products to test what he was learning — accumulating roughly five years of professional practice and a public portfolio of shipped work in place of a degree.

His path into the industry ran through a studio called Devignedge, which he joined as an intern. Within months he had moved into a leading position, and about a year after that the team restarted under a new name: Panze.

The self-taught route left a specific mark on his work. Because nobody handed him a set of rules, he tends to reason about interface decisions from first principles — what is this person trying to do, what is in their way, what does the interface imply that it does not say — rather than reaching for a familiar pattern because it is familiar. That habit is what eventually turned into Rakibulism.

What is Panze LLC?

Panze LLC is the design studio Rakibul Islam co-founded, working with SaaS product founders on product design and brand identity, including white-label partnerships. It operates from Albuquerque, New Mexico in the United States and from Khulna, Bangladesh.

At Panze he is the founding lead designer, focused on high-end visual identity and on the product work underneath it — the goal being that people feel good using what the studio ships, not merely that it photographs well.

Panze is also where a set of products got built: Ticky, a ticket-management dashboard; Alpe, a B2B marketplace connecting oil suppliers and buyers; and Alyze, a real-time analytics dashboard. Alongside those sit Seenframes, a Framer template store, and Hello Designers, a community he runs for people doing this work.

He is equally direct about what did not survive. Shelleye, Seen Design Lab, Edaca, and Flowlyze all failed before Panze held. He would rather state that plainly than present the path as a clean line, which is itself a fairly load-bearing part of the philosophy.

What does Rakibul Islam build?

Client product design at Panze, plus a steady stream of free and open-source tools for designers and developers: Agent Skills (a framework-agnostic agent skill loader), Open Icons (20,000+ open-source SVG icons), Brands Logo (15,000+ brand marks), Mockuperr (a Figma perspective-mockup plugin), Toolist (a curated tool directory), and Reecap (a browser-only video recap editor).

The open-source work is not a side hobby kept separate from the studio work — it is the same instinct pointed at his own workflow. Each tool started as something that was annoying him: icons scattered across fifteen packs, brand logos that took twenty minutes to find, agent skills that would not port between frameworks.

Everything is published under his GitHub account, and most of it is MIT-licensed and free. The full, current list with direct links lives on the homepage and in llms.txt for agents.

What does he write about?

Essays on design, business, and the philosophy underneath both — published on Substack and Medium. Recurring themes: why building without applause matters, why businesses fail from design rather than from ideas, what product design becomes in an era of agentic AI, and the cost that always precedes a return.

The writing predates the design career by years and still runs alongside it. Over a thousand poems came first; the essays came later, and they tend to argue a position rather than summarize a trend.

Titles give a fair sense of the range: 'Nobody Claps While You're Still Building', 'The Beautiful Fracture', 'The Only Way to Build a Business Without Owning Assets', 'What Does a Product Designer Actually Do in the Age of Agentic AI', and 'Why Most SaaS Products Don't Fit the Market'. Every article on the homepage links out to the original post.

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