Rafael Rodrigues

Digital Design Studio is a fractional product design and front-end development practice for funded startups in life sciences, pharma, healthcare, additive manufacturing, and AI. Founded by Rafael Rodrigues, an independent product designer with over a decade of experience, the studio takes products from research through to production-ready code.

Who is Rafael Rodrigues?

Rafael Rodrigues is a senior product designer and front-end engineer with 11 years of experience designing web and mobile software. He works on interfaces for people doing technical work — computational scientists, clinical researchers, data scientists, and manufacturing engineers — where the hard part is usually making a complex system legible rather than making a simple one attractive.

He designs in Figma and writes the production front-end that ships, working in React, Next.js, Astro, and Swift. Doing both removes the design-to-engineering handoff, which is where most interface detail gets lost in translation.

What does Digital Design Studio do?

Digital Design Studio provides fractional product design on a monthly retainer: one senior designer engaged continuously, rather than a full-time hire or a fixed-scope project. Retainers run $7,500 to $12,500 per month and include a 7-day risk-free trial. Monthly terms cancel anytime; quarterly terms trade a 3-month minimum for a lower rate.

The work covers five areas: web applications, mobile applications, marketing sites, investor decks, and design systems. Clients are funded startups from pre-seed through Series B, concentrated in life sciences, pharma, healthcare, additive manufacturing, and AI.

Which companies has Rafael worked with?

Rafael has designed software for Eli Lilly, AstraZeneca, TetraScience, Stratasys, GoTo, Rhino Federated Computing, Jaxon AI, FeedOtter, and Secured Health. Each engagement is written up in full:

• A workbench for model tuning at Lilly — Eli Lilly · TuneLab, 2026
• Designing clinical trials with an agent in the loop — AstraZeneca, 2026
• The operating system for federated clinical AI — Rhino Federated Computing, 2024 - 2026
• Making black-box AI transparent and controllable — Jaxon AI, 2024 - 2025
• A no-code email builder for marketers — FeedOtter, 2025
• Connecting underserved communities to care — Secured Health, 2024
• The data platform for the scientific lab — TetraScience · Founding designer, 2023
• All client communication in one app — GoTo, 2022
• Real-time 3D print monitoring in your pocket — Stratasys, 2020

How do engagements work?

Onboarding takes under 24 hours on business days. Once a retainer starts, work runs through a shared Notion board for the backlog, Slack for day-to-day communication, and weekly video syncs — two per week on the Core retainer, up to four on the Dedicated one.

Digital Design Studio signs NDAs and works under client confidentiality and IP assignment terms as standard, which is a requirement for the pharma and clinical engagements it takes on. See privacy and confidentiality for details, or the answers to common questions for pricing and process specifics.