Brand and design system consulting for
Uwazi v2, the open-source human rights documentation platform by
Huridocs, used by 150+ organizations worldwide. Engaged November 2025 to January 2026.
The Idea
A tribute to the people who do the work of memory: archivists, researchers, and the materials they've worked with for centuries. Paper, ink, the impression of a letterpress. Calm and editorial by default, color held back for where it counts.
The thinking
Uwazi is one codebase serving 150+ organizations, from large legal teams to two-person archives, many of them non-technical and working in hard conditions. A loud brand would have fought the content, which is often evidence of the worst things people do to each other.
So the system gets out of the way. Editorial by default, monospace for the record, color held back for the few places it has to mean something. The letterpress idea gave it a reason to be quiet without being cold.
The harder constraint was that it had to survive being implemented by other people. It ships as tokens and patterns a small open-source team can hold in their heads and apply without me in the room.
Logomarks
The logo is the wordmark above. These are the marks that stand in for it when the wordmark cannot.
App icon
Rounded square for OS surfaces
Symbol mark
Stamp form for compact uses
Palette
Named for the press. Three for ink and stamp, three for paper stock.
Ink #1A1A1A the letterpress
Seal #E8432A the stamp
Carbon #00B4F0 the copy
Vellum #F5EED7 warm stock
Parchment #F5F0E8 cool stock
Paper #FFFFFF the margin
Type
Uwazi
Roboto Mono · brandAa Bb 01
The quiet record of what happened, who said it, and when.
Inter · interfaceAa Bb 01
Roboto Mono carries the wordmark, a quiet nod to monospaced records. Inter does the day-to-day reading.
Brand World
The rebrand extends past the logo into a full art-directed visual language, an homage to print, ink and paper.
Duotone field. Place as evidence.Stacked record. The archive itself.Halftone burst. Moments of attention.Dispersed cube. The mark broken open.
In product
The brand carried through to the surface people actually use.
Document view. The page as the primary object.Metadata. Records around the record.Dark mode. Same calm, inverted.
Status
Live as the brand and design system for Uwazi v2. In daily use across 150+ organizations documenting human rights work worldwide. Engaged November 2025 to January 2026.
Mantel is a white-label operations platform for restaurants and bars in Ecuador. Waiters fire the order from their phone, the kitchen sees it on screen, and every sale goes out invoiced with the SRI built in. A public website with a QR menu and online reservations comes included. One system to run the floor on a Friday at 8pm.
The Idea
Software the way it should be: made to fit your room, not a system that does everything halfway. Mantel is the one place the whole night lives. And it's yours, not an account shared with a hundred other restaurants. Your own instance, in your color, your logo, your domain. El Encanto in Quito is customer zero.
The problem
A restaurant in Quito runs the night on five things that don't talk to each other: a POS rented by the month, a separate portal for the SRI billing, a WhatsApp thread for reservations, a printed menu that's wrong by Friday, and a notebook for the count at close. Nothing reconciles. The owner finds out what happened on Saturday, not during.
Most software sold here is the opposite of help: one shared cloud account, a hundred venues deep, built for none of them. You bend your room to fit the system.
I built Mantel the other way around. One instance per venue, the whole night in one place, the SRI billing inside it instead of bolted on. The bet was that an owner would rather run their own system in their own brand than rent a seat in someone else's. El Encanto proved it out as customer zero, and it's now going to other rooms.
What it does
Ten areas, each a live view of the same night.
The floor: Live table map. Free, seated, reserved, covers at a glance.
Orders & kitchen: The comanda goes from the waiter's phone to a paperless KDS.
Cash & close-out: Open with a float, close with the count and the difference.
Inventory & cost: Multi-store stock, recipes tied to dishes, margin per plate.
Digital menu: A QR menu in your brand; 86 a dish and it's gone.
Reservations & door: Online bookings and walk-ins, straight onto the floor.
Staff & shifts: Clock-in, the weekly rota, hours per person.
Roles & access: Eight roles, each its own view; installs as a PWA.
Reports & accounting: Sales, cost, and margin, ready for your accountant.
SRI billing: Electronic invoicing inside; close the table and it's filed.
In product
Live prototype views from the system: floor, kitchen, inventory, menu, billing, and the white-label theming.
Salón. The floor in real time: seated, free, reserved.Cocina. The comanda lands on the KDS, no paper.Inventario. Multi-store stock and margin per plate.Carta QR. 86 a dish and it disappears for guests.SRI. The bill files itself. IVA and service figured.Marca blanca. The same operation, re-themed to each venue.
How it works
Three steps, no eternal migration.
We talk: Understand the place, its zones, its menu, how the team works a night.
We configure and deploy: Your own instance (your brand, floor plan, and menu), set up and live.
You operate: The team is in on day one and it works.
Status
Running in production in Quito. El Encanto is the first venue on it, customer zero. In active build and being offered to other restaurants and bars, July 2026.
A wine garden in Quito. Built around small-grower bottles, food made for the table, and an outdoor garden that doubles as the dining room.
A full engagement: name, brand, strategy, the website at elencanto-uio.com, on-site pieces (menus, signage, the little stuff that touches a guest), social media and photography for the place, and the operations app the team uses to run service.
The Idea
A warm dark room. A hand-drawn mark in cream like ink on a coaster. Wine first, then the food that goes with it, then the garden that holds both. Everything tuned to feel like a table you sit down at, not a brand you scan.
Logo
A mark and a wordmark that name what the place is.
On the room.
On paper.
Palette
Wine country at dusk. Deep browns and grass green hold the room. Gold and beige are the candlelight. Accent red is for the bottle you want to remember.
Deep Brown #4A1F1A the room
Brown #6E3C30 oak and earth
Grass #3D4A40 the garden
Gold #C9A66B candlelight
Beige #FFF6EA paper and ink
Accent #BE2641 the bottle
Type
Arboria in two weights for the words, Lindsey for the handwritten touches: chalkboard specials, a flourish on a card.
Arboria Book body
Arboria Black display
Lindsey accent
Brand World
Photography from the place: the house, the corridor, the garden.
La casona.El corredor.El jardín.
Operations app
The team at El Encanto needed something to run service. I'm building it with them.
The first version is small on purpose. The host takes orders on whatever device is nearest. The kitchen gets a printed ticket and marks it done. The floor watches the state from the same screen. Nobody has to cross the garden to ask where an order is.
Building from scratch means we can shape it to the room instead of fitting the room to someone else's POS.
Web client: React + Tailwind, runs on whatever device is closest to the host
API: Hono on Node with WebSockets for live order state
Print bridge: A small local service that listens for new tickets and pushes them to the kitchen printer
Data: Postgres with Drizzle, fully typed
In product
The whole flow, start to finish: a waiter takes the order, the kitchen sees it, the table sees a bill, the night closes out.
Mesero. Orders into the system.Cocina. Tickets land, get marked done.Cuentas. Splits and totals.Caja. End of the night.
Status
Brand and site are live. Operations app is in active build, July 2026.
A Mac app I'm building for the way I actually work. I run two or three Claude Code sessions at once, often on the same repo, each one delegating to subagents. In separate terminals that means constant window-switching, no view of who delegated to whom or what any of it costs, and agents tripping over each other's changes.
Operator is the place I launch and watch them from. Each session runs in its own embedded terminal, every tool call and subagent shows up live on a timeline, and each agent works in its own git worktree so nothing collides.
The thinking
The first instinct with a tool like this is to wrap the agent: proxy its traffic, install a runtime, own the session. I didn't want that. The moment Operator becomes something you install into the loop, it can break the loop.
So it stays a pure observer. It pins each session's id at launch and rebuilds the timeline from Claude Code's own transcripts. Nothing is installed, there's no global config, and if Operator isn't running the agents work exactly as before. Permissions are the one place it can step in, and only through an optional hook you choose to add.
Features
Projects as the unit: Sessions group under the repo they belong to. Each project carries its own agent roster (model, effort, and permissions per lane), a task backlog agents pick up on launch, and a moodboard, and every agent is told at spawn which siblings are already running
Agent library with per-task models: A visual editor over your .claude/agents/*.md. The point is choosing which model runs each agent (Haiku for extraction, Sonnet for general work, Opus for hard reasoning) with cost and speed hints right where you pick
Live orchestration timeline: Every session's tool calls and subagent delegations as they happen, nested by who spawned whom, with a ticking duration on the running tool and elapsed time on the finished ones. Rebuilt from Claude Code's own transcripts, so nothing gets installed
Console, Chat, and Preview views: The raw terminal, a document-style chat with a real composer (image attachments, model and effort controls, slash commands), and a live preview of the app being built, where pinned annotations go back to the agent as a punch list
Isolated worktrees and fan-out: Each agent gets its own git worktree, so parallel agents on one repo never collide. Fan a single task out across several agents at once, each badged so the group reads at a glance
In-app diff review: See a session's changes in a built-in diff viewer, then Commit, Merge back to base, or Discard without leaving the app
Inline permissions and auto-approve rules: With the optional hook installed, approve or deny an agent's action inline as it asks. One click on "Always" turns that into a standing rule
Usage and cost dashboard: Token-driven insight into what's driving usage, plus a per-model breakdown of input, output, cache, cost, and API vs wall time
Pick up where you left off: Open sessions save continuously to a crash-safe store. Relaunch and resume the exact conversation, or reopen clean
Command palette: Cmd+K. Cmd+N for a new session, Cmd+1–9 to switch. Drop an image on the window to paste its path, click a link in the terminal to open it
How it works
Operator pins each session's id at launch (claude --session-id <uuid>) and tails its transcript to rebuild the timeline live, so it stays a pure observer of the sessions it starts, with nothing installed and no global config.
Permissions are optional. Install Operator's hook and each tool use gates through an inline prompt before it runs. The hook only acts on sessions Operator started; it keys on the OPERATOR_TERMINAL_ID env var injected into each terminal, so a claude you run yourself in iTerm or VS Code hits it but exits immediately. With no hook installed, Claude Code works normally.
Stack
React 19, Vite, and Tailwind on the front, a Tauri 2 (Rust) backend behind it. portable-pty with an xterm.js WebGL renderer for the embedded terminals, a transcript tailer for the timeline, and an optional tiny_http server for the permission hook.
Status
In active build, at v0.8 as of July 2026. The source is private, but signed macOS builds are public.
An interactive terminal in a browser. Type commands to move through the site, change themes, or load a game. The whole thing pretends to be a CRT from 1985 and most of the time you forget it isn't.
A tribute to my first computer, a Commodore 64, and to the command lines I grew up reading.
Screens
The portfolio routes you can navigate by command or by URL.
home · the promptabout · who I amwork · employmentprojects · case studies
Also: skills, contact, and cv. Type the name or click a menu item.
Games
Type the name at the prompt and play. The frame stays in character.
snake · don't bite yourselfasteroids · vector ships, vector rocksinvaders · faster every wavequito-runner · my city, with weapons
Themes
Six to choose from: blackvoid, crt, hydra, mr-pink, synthwave, and untitled. Type theme at the prompt to cycle, or pick one by name.
Stack
Vite + vanilla TypeScript. SVG filter for the CRT barrel distortion. CSS scanlines and color tokens per theme. No frameworks.
Status
Live at terminus.juanmnl.com. Done and playable; it gets a new game or theme when the mood strikes.
A fasting tracker for the Apple Watch. I fast most days and wanted something that lived on my wrist: start a fast, glance at the ring, see what my body is doing, and log it without reaching for my phone. Most fasting apps are bloated and want a subscription. This one does one thing.
The logo doubles as the interface: the mark fills bottom-up as the fast runs, so it reads the second you raise your wrist. Pick a preset, watch it fill, and learn what your body is doing in each phase as the hours pass.
The thinking
Every fasting app I tried wanted an account, a subscription, and my phone in the loop. A fast is a start time and a goal; the tracker should live where the glance happens. So Fastrack is watch-only by design. No iPhone app, no accounts, no analytics, nothing leaves the device.
The other bet was making the brand do the work. The mark, stacked bars clipped to a circle, is the app icon, the complication glyph, and the progress gauge itself. One shape carries the whole app.
Features
Quick-start presets: 12:12, 13:11, 16:8, 18:6, 20:4, 24h, or a custom length. One tap starts the fast
Logo gauge: The mark itself is the progress display, filling bottom-up in silver as the fast runs
Phase education: A live read on the metabolic phase you're in, from digesting to deep ketosis, with the next milestone counting down
History and streaks: A calendar of past fasts you can edit day by day, current and longest streak, and weekly trend charts
Schedule and reminders: Optional phase and goal alerts plus a daily start reminder, local notifications only
Complications: A corner complication and a Smart Stack card with live fast status
Fasting phases
The physiological milestones the app surfaces while a fast is running.
0 to 4h, Digesting: Blood sugar rises, insulin active
4 to 8h, Post-absorptive: Blood sugar stabilizing
8 to 12h, Early Fasting: Blood sugar drops, fat burning begins
12 to 14h, Metabolic Switch: Ketone production starting
14 to 18h, Fat Burning: Ketosis ramping up
18 to 24h, Autophagy: Cellular cleanup accelerating
24h and up, Deep Ketosis: Growth hormone elevated
Design
Monochrome, derived entirely from the logo: black, white, and greys on a pure black canvas with a subtle film grain. Liquid Glass surfaces for the controls, SF Rounded throughout. Secondary actions live below the fold, so the gauge always owns the screen.
Stack
SwiftUI on watchOS 26, standalone, so it runs without the phone. Swift Charts for the trends, HealthKit for an optional weight log, local notifications for the reminders.
