Good work was always around me. Most of it just hadn't been seen yet.
I work with founders who have something worth believing in. My job is to make sure the outside finally matches the inside.
Featured work
KULA: UI & Digital
Currently
Open for projects ✦
Selected Work
Client work from Nairobi and beyond. Every brief was real, every constraint was real, and every result had to hold up in the world.
UI & Digital Banners
Digital banners, EDM, and UI web design for the first fair-trade investment model empowering communities. The challenge was making an institutional finance model feel distinctly human, approachable, and trustworthy.
Social Media
Social Media
A diverse collection of engaging social media designs. By focusing on typography and negative space, these creatives cut through platform noise to deliver clear, scroll-stopping value.
Brand Identity
Brand Identity
High-end residential development branding. The strategy required balancing a minimalist, contemporary aesthetic with a bilingual (English/Arabic) brandmark that commands luxury without feeling unapproachable.
Brand Identity
Brand Identity
Modern interior design store branding. The design language uses minimalist, custom shapes inspired by the logo mark to create an artistic, gallery-like experience for the customer.
Digital Marketing
Digital Marketing
High-impact advertising campaigns for global brands like Aston Martin. The outcome centered on compelling visual storytelling that elevated product perception and drove engagement.
Art Direction
Art Direction
Print and digital campaigns for luxury hospitality brands including Conrad and InterContinental Cairo. The design successfully communicated exclusivity while maintaining an inviting, warm tone.
Editorial Layout
Editorial Layout
Comprehensive page layout and art direction for KULA's investment presentation. Strong typography and deliberate editorial pacing transformed dense financial data into an engaging narrative.
Social Media Campaign
Social Media Campaign
Dynamic promotional campaign tailored for automotive retail. The challenge was maintaining a premium brand feel while communicating urgent holiday specials and retail offers.
Browse every project, brand identity, and campaign, all in one place.
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The Person Behind It
There's a reason this work matters to me.
I'm Denis Kirimi, a graphic designer and web developer trained through ALX Africa, working out of Nairobi. I specialise in strategic visual design—building brand identities, editorial layouts, social media creatives, and digital experiences.
The brands I respect most aren't the loudest ones. They're the ones that feel like the person behind them actually decided something. Every colour, every typeface, every layout is a choice. My job is to make sure those choices add up to something a client can stand behind and an audience immediately trusts.
I've worked on brands from fair-trade investment funds (KULA) to luxury residential developments (MADA) to international hospitality (Conrad & InterContinental Cairo). Different industries, same question every time: what does this business actually believe, and how do we show it?
I don't start with a mood board. I start with a question: what does your audience need to feel the moment they see this? Everything else follows from that.
Every client I work with should leave feeling like their brand finally caught up to the quality of what they actually do.
Design Philosophy
Not rules I read in a book. These are the things I keep arriving at after enough projects to know which shortcuts are expensive.
The first instinct is always to make it broader. More colours, more options, more "versatility." But the brands that actually stick are the ones that made a specific decision and committed to it. KULA works because it looks exactly like what fair-trade investment should look like. Nothing more, nothing less.
Clients come in wanting a new logo. Nine times out of ten, the logo is fine. What's broken is everything around it: the typography that doesn't match, the colour that changes every platform, the layout that has no system. Identity work is mostly bringing the rest of the brand up to the level of what already exists.
This takes time to trust. Every client wants to fill the gaps. But breathing room is what separates something editorial from something cluttered. I've had to learn to defend the emptiness, because it's doing as much work as everything else on the page.
Version one always looks better than it is. You're still too close to it. The real work starts on version two, when you can finally see what you were actually trying to say. I never send a first draft. I send the version where I've already had the argument with myself.
Design shouldn't require a caption. When I worked on the MADA residential brand, the brief was "luxury without being cold." If I needed to write a note explaining how we achieved that, we hadn't achieved it. The right brand makes the feeling obvious before anyone reads a word.
// Still learning. Probably always will be.
Projects That Taught Me Something
I don't believe in portfolio padding. Here are pieces of work I'm genuinely proud of: flaws, compromises, and the things I'd do differently.
The Problem
I kept missing trades while I slept. Manual monitoring wasn't scalable, and every alert I tried still required me to be at a screen to act.
What I Did
Built MaliBot as a weekend experiment. It became a three-month deep dive into WebSocket data streams, risk management algorithms, and the humbling realization that markets don't care about elegant code.
What surprised me
The hardest part wasn't the trading logic: it was learning when not to trade. Restraint is a feature.
The Problem
Most portfolios show the polished surface. Mine shows the thinking. The real work lives in commit history, half-finished experiments, and honest architecture decisions.
What I Did
This isn't a finished product; it's a working document. Every repo is a snapshot of a problem I found interesting enough to sit with for a while.
What surprised me
Resisting the urge to clean everything up before publishing. Messy code is honest code.
The Workbench
Exploring ways to make UI elements feel weighty and physical without relying on 3D libraries. Focusing on spring physics and how humans perceive weight through motion.
Backtesting new risk-management algorithms for MaliBot using historical M15 data. Current accuracy rate is either impressive or a coincidence, still figuring out which.
Studying print design grids from the 1970s and figuring out how to translate them to responsive CSS Grid. Turns out old designers solved a lot of problems we keep reinventing.
// Last updated: May 2026
Certification & Expertise
Certified by ALX Africa across brand design, digital marketing, editorial, and photo editing. The programme gave me a structured foundation for skills I had already been developing in the real world.
I build brand identity systems that give a business a clear visual voice: logos, colour palettes, typography, and a set of rules that mean the brand looks like itself everywhere it appears. A good identity doesn't need to be explained.
Professional Certification
Candidate
Denis Kirimi
Certificate ID
FNTfmJpGXe
Issued By
ALX Africa
Status
What People Say
“Denis has a unique ability to translate complex business requirements into visual designs that feel effortless and human. He elevated our entire brand presence.”
Amina Wanjiku
Operations Manager, KULA
“Working with DenZen was a masterclass in intentional design. Every choice had a reason, and the final identity exceeded our expectations.”
Daniel Mwangi
Creative Director