Julius Gehrig
Product Designer
Hello there! My name is Julius and I'm a Product Designer currently based in Berlin. I grew up on the internet and love computers and software.
In my 10 years of experience I have designed User Interfaces and experiences, planned, supported, and implemented features and roadmaps, and lead cross-functional teams at companies like Pitch, Microsoft, and Native Instruments.
I'm currently open for new roles, so if you think we'd be a match please get in touch!
Presentation software for fast-moving teams
Pitch is a presentation tool that helps people create visually stunning presentations, together, in the browser. I joined the company in 2018 as the first employee after the founding team and touched many parts of the app in the six years that followed.
Most recently I led the UI Design on the AI Presentation Generator that we launched with our 2.0 release.
UI details and flow of the presentation generator
Creative tools like Pitch come with their own particular kind of design challenges. Users will perform a mixture of actions over and over again. And so it's important to get the little things right in order to avoid "death by a thousand cuts", where small inconveniences add up to a unsatisfactory overall experience. For my work on the Pitch editor this meant sweating the details, being very intentional about what features to add, and keeping the overall Pitch experience in mind.
In my designs for Pitch I focussed on keeping the UI as clean as possible and letting users choose from tasteful defaults, more customization can then be accessed one level deeper. A nice example of this is the color picker: We guide users towards sticking to the colors set in the presentation style or the ones already present in the presentation, but if they feel that's not enough they can always add their own custom colors one level deeper.
UI & Interaction details across Pitch
To ship features with a high level of polish I worked closely together with other disciplines such as research, engineering, and product management. Besides feature UI work I ran multiple design explorations, and between 2020 and 2022 lead the Dataviz Team. Our team consisted of an EM, four Frontend Devs, and me as the Team Lead & Designer. Together we planned, prototyped, and implemented the Roadmap for the chart, tables, shapes, and color picker tools in Pitch.
Screenshots of stakeholder updates and workshops created / run by me
In total I spent six years working at Pitch. In this time I saw the company growing from nine to over a hundred people. I presented my work at board meetings, design reviews, and in front of our users. I designed features, helped them grow over time, and also had to kill some again. Working at Pitch has made me deeply appreciate how much fun it can be to design and build software with others who love software and value good design.
What people at Pitch have to say about me:
Julius worked with the Wunderlist team at Microsoft before I hired him at Pitch. He’s an extremely loyal, likeable, bright and skilled product designer and team lead.
His superpower is his passion for well-crafted software and hardware, and a unique talent to combine that with his skills for interface design. He’s incredibly curious and always wants to learn more and dig deeper.
Julius is incredibly fun to work with, his energy level is nuts.
Christian Reber
Role at Pitch: Founder & CEO
I had the pleasure of working with Julius at Pitch for over five years, much of that time as his direct manager.
Julius is an outstanding Product Designer who consistently exceeded expectations in his role. It’s hard to find a part of the product he hasn’t worked on. He also took on team/product leadership for the Tables & Charts area and quickly leveled up his team leadership skills, tackling complex challenges and delivering consistently. He deeply understands our users’ needs and focused on high-impact, rather than just flashy features.
Given Pitch's startup environment, Julius's adaptability and eagerness to contribute wherever possible were particularly invaluable. Beyond his professional skills, he's a genuinely warm and engaging person, bringing positive energy that benefits the whole team.
If you have the chance to hire Julius, I'd highly recommend you take it. It's rare to find someone who combines such strong design skills with a great team attitude.
Kevin Cannon
Role at Pitch: Senior Design Manager
I had the pleasure of working closely with Julius at Pitch, where he not only served as the Designer but also the Team Lead when I joined the team. Julius impressed me right off the bat with his wealth of experience, leadership skills, and dedication to elevating our product to its best potential.
What sets Julius apart is his ability to seamlessly transition between fast iterations on a prototype together with engineers and ensuring that every pixel finds its perfect place. This makes him an invaluable asset for any team aspiring to deliver exceptional products.
Mitja Bezenšek
Role at Pitch: Engineering Manager
A modern browser concept
In 2018 Julius Sohn and I published our bachelor thesis on the topic of the web browser. We spend so much time browsing the web that we hardly even think about the browser as an app. And while the web itself has undergone big changes in the last twenty years, browsers had remained largely the same.
And so we set out to reimagine what a modern browser could look like. The result is a browser concept that tackles what we think were the most important issues with browsers at the the time.
Watch the youtube video
We felt current browsers fell short when it came to letting you organize and compartmentalize your browsing activity. But we also wanted to avoid a UI that forced users to feel like they would permanently have to clean up after themselves. And so we put extra care into all the little interactions that would make up daily usage of Refresh. Key highlights here are the Space Switcher and the browser history. We felt the interaction design was a key component to making the navigation of the browser UI effortless and fast.
UI details of the space overview and browser history in Refresh
Since we published Refresh is 2018 there has been quite a bit of development in the browser space. iOS 15 brought a new version of Safari to the iPhone that made navigating tabs much faster and more fluent. New browsers like Arc have made Spaces and the distinction between active and saved (pinned) tabs a mainstay of modern browsers. This makes us very happy as people who felt like the browser wasn't getting the attention it deserved, and we can't wait to see where things will go from here!
For a full overview of the project with more UI details and background on the design process check out the website below!
To-Dos in the Microsoft ecosystem
In 2017 I joined the Microsoft To-Do team in Berlin for an internship. I worked mostly on the web, iOS and Android Apps of Microsoft To-Do. This included making prototypes for user testing, adapting designs across platforms and coming up with new designs based on data and testing.
To-Do onboarding flow designs from usability testing
The four months at Microsoft gave me a glimpse of what working on a product with a userbase as large as the Office Suite was like. Besides design work on the To-Do apps I also helped out with the integrations of To-Do in the wider Office Suite, and helped design the website for the Wunderlist shutdown that prompted users to migrate to To-Do.
Pitch
2018 - 2024
Senior Product Designer
Microsoft
2017
Product Design Intern
Dropscan
2017
Freelance Product Designer
Boana
2016
UI / UX Designer
Native Instruments
2015 - 2016
GUI Designer
GUI Design Intern
While my focus is mostly on product design I like to tinker in other areas such as icon design and 3D rendering.
