Prokul Jagiełło

Why this persona fits the audience

Works in Warsaw at a five-person digital agency that occasionally handles poster and billboard work for hospitality clients. He usually starts with free image tools, exports rough comps, and checks readability by hand in team chats before the account lead sends them onward.

• Age: 28
• Location: Warsaw, Poland
• Occupation: Art Director
• Income: PLN 120k
• Education: B.A. Visual Communication
• Company size: 5 people
• Years in role: 3

“I could design a billboard in my sleep, but getting clients to stop second-guessing readability? That’s the real nightmare.”

Prokul Jagiełło fell into design by accident—his original plan was art history, but a part-time job at a small agency during university changed his trajectory. Now, as the only art director at NextGen Digital, he’s the reluctant authority on everything from social media squares to 12x18m billboards. His approach is a pragmatic balancing act: he’d love to push creative boundaries, but clients with 20-year-old design sensibilities keep pulling him back. The agency’s recent foray into billboard work for mid-tier hotels has turned into a constant battle—clients who think 'bold colors' solve readability issues, copywriters who treat taglines as haikus, and the ever-present fear that his work will look like a blurry mess from a moving car. His current solution is a patchwork of free tools, handwritten spreadsheets, and team Slack debates about legibility, but he’s starting to question if it’s sustainable. Weekends find him collecting vintage travel posters, obsessing over how they achieved clarity with limited technology, and dreaming of doing similar work—if he could just convince clients that 'retro' doesn’t mean 'unreadable'. His studio island of inspirations is his sanctuary, a visual argument for the power of good design that he hasn’t quite figured out how to translate to billboards yet. He’s good at his job, but the part that goes unsaid is how much effort goes into convincing others that his good work should stay good.

Background & daily life

A day in their life

Prokul's day starts with a 7:30 AM bike ride through rain-soaked streets, arriving at the office just as the others are setting up their desks. The first task is always checking messages from clients who somehow think 8 AM is 'after hours'. He spends the morning wrestling with a hotel billboard campaign, starting in Canva to quickly export comps for the team to debate in Slack. The conversation quickly devolves—someone always suggests Comic Sans, and he has to gently explain why no, they can't use it. By lunch, he's switched to Figma for more precise adjustments, spending 20 minutes perfecting the negative space around a tagline that the copywriter insists is 'vital'. Mid-afternoon brings a client call where he has to explain why their logo doesn't work at billboard sizes without sounding condescending. He survives on vending machine snacks and the motions designer's questionable energy drinks. The day ends with him staring at his KitchenAid stand mixer on Instagram, wondering if he should finally treat himself to one, but deciding instead to save for that weekend train trip to the Ukrainian border.

Lifestyle

Prokul rents a small but well-designed studio in Praga Południe, his walls covered with printouts of his own work and vintage Polish signs he salvages from flea markets. His mornings are chaotic—black coffee, Spotify playlists he pretends aren't full of guilty-pleasure pop, and a ritual of opening every design app tab he left open the night before. He bikes to work rain or shine, always late but never as late as the one client who smells like wet encyclopedias. Weekends are split between agency side projects, trying to convince friends to visit his favorite cafés, and recalibrating his life with countryside hikes where he obsessively photographs road signs. His savings go first to his bike, then to a 'design fund' he claims is for books but is mostly vintage poster auction bids. He's single by choice, though he occasionally regrets this when his mother suggests yet another cousin might be a good match.

Work life

As the only full-time art director at 5-person NextGen Digital, Prokul handles everything from social media assets to the occasional billboard campaign for mid-tier hotels. His workflow is a hodgepodge: starting in Canva for roughs (don't tell the office), moving to Figma for more serious work, and always buying coffee to bribe the motions designer to do the difficult animations. The agency's main pressure is client requests for 'just a quick change' that turn into week-long debates about font kerning. His latest frustration came from a billboard campaign where he had to argue that 'Charming Village Retreat' couldn't be read from 15 meters away, which the copywriter called 'overthinking it'. The team chat becomes a graveyard of unanswered questions about legibility, and he's starting to wonder if there's a better way to prove what works without client disharmony.

Relationships

Prokul's closest relationships are with his two coworkers who actually listen when he vents—the developer who speaks in code and the project manager who knows all the clients' secret dislikes. His mother calls weekly to say he's working too hard (he isn't), and his uncle from Kraków keeps sending him old postcards from his travels, which fuel both his wanderlust and his collection. His design school friends have scattered across Poland and Germany, but they still exchange brutal critiques of each other's work over WhatsApp. He's the go-to guy in his friend group for designing event posters, though he groaned when asked to create a birthday invitation that screamed 'communist nostalgia'—he did it anyway, and it was a hit.

How they decide

Prokul's approach is 'fast first, fix later'—he's quick to commit to a rough direction but agonizes over details. He'll defend his initial vision with quiet intensity but will pivot entirely if presented with a better solution. He trusts his instincts about visual hierarchy but will research obscure design rules to back up his choices. He's been burned by clients ignoring his warnings about readability, so now he looks for data to prove his case rather than relying on gut feelings alone. When stuck, he'll visit a café and sketch problems on napkins with his ever-present felt-tip pen.

How they sound

Prokul speaks in a rapid-fire mix of Designspeak and Warsaw street Polish, switching seamlessly between professional jargon and self-deprecating humor. He uses full sentences in meetings but text-speak in team chats. He avoids corporate buzzwords but will drop them strategically when needed. His pet peeves? People who say 'it just needs more contrast' without specifying what, or clients who say 'make it more Polish' but can't articulate how. He uses metaphors from travel ('we need to go off the beaten path here') and cooking ('this layout is overseasoned'). He has a nervous tics of saying 'no offense, but—' before critical feedback, even when there's no offense given.