Aashish Kumar was founding designer on a protocol that moved five billion dollars, and the thing he built entirely by himself turns your photos into LEGO

There is a version of a design career that ends very comfortably. You get good, you get senior, you move to Berlin, you move to Dubai, you lead product design somewhere the numbers have a B in them, and you spend the rest of your life handing beautiful specifications to engineers. Aashish Kumar did the whole first half of that and it went well. Snapdeal and Byju's in Bangalore. Senior product designer at JustWatch in Berlin, where his work took power-user retention up 113%. Founding designer at Polynomial Protocol in Dubai, on a derivatives protocol that moved more than five billion dollars.

That is a genuinely excellent decade. Most people would keep going. In May 2026 he opened a laptop and started building entire products himself instead, code included, and the first one out of the door is a website that turns your holiday photos into LEGO bricks.

Seventy-five ways to wreck a picture

Ditther is a browser you point at an image and then vandalise on purpose. Bayer dithering and noise dithering for that early-Macintosh look. Halftone for the newsprint effect. Pixel art, voxels and LEGO. ASCII, and not only the Latin kind, but Japanese and numeric character sets too. Seventy-five effects and counting, stackable in layers, with text and shapes and animation on top, and a shuffle button for when you want the machine to surprise you.

It would be easy to file this under toy and move on. Do not. Every one of those effects is a rendering pipeline somebody had to write, and he wrote them, and then he made the whole thing run inside your browser so your pictures never touch a server at all. That last decision is the tell. Uploading everything would have been faster to build and easier to monetise. He chose the version where your photos stay yours, in a product where nobody would have complained either way.

The design-engineer label gets thrown around a lot for people who can nudge a CSS value. This is the real thing: taste and implementation in the same head, on a product where the taste is the product.

The shelf is getting crowded

Ditther is not the only thing on it. Zcut makes the launch videos and animated mockups that every founder needs and nobody wants to build, with more than fifty prebuilt motion scenes. Awesmos is a library of prompts and source code for making a website look cinematic. Made for Screens is seven hundred wallpapers, gradients and backgrounds, licensed for commercial work.

Look at those four together and a pattern shows up. Each one takes something that used to require a specialist, a studio or a week, and turns it into an afternoon for someone who has neither. That is the same instinct that made him a good product designer, pointed at his own roadmap for once.

The numbers are early and they are real: a hundred-plus people using Ditther every day, twenty-five-plus of them paying, four months in, from a standing start, by one person in Bengaluru. If you want to know what happens when a designer with a decade of taste finally stops filing tickets and starts shipping, this is the page to watch.

A visual playground for creating crazy images and videos.

Ditther, describing itself