The
Magus
of MVHV a holographic reading of twenty years in product design, design engineering, and AI‑native work.

Marco van Hylckama Vlieg, here invoked as the Magus, arcanum the twenty‑third, has spent twenty years setting type, drawing systems, shipping product, and now teaching machines to ship beside him. The Netherlands gave him a language, California gave him an industry, and Oregon — where the rain falls straight and the cedars are honest — gives him a desk.

He has been the designer of record at Google (Cloud AI · Assistant · Android prototyping), Yahoo! (director of UX prototyping), Walmart Labs (principal product designer), Endemol (UX & engineering lead), and now Kohl’s — senior product designer & generative‑AI specialist, leading UX across cart, checkout, wallet, account, and in‑store self‑checkout while driving AI tooling and education across the design org. He has been the designer of his own record, too: ai‑created.com, an independent product lab whose recent shipments — My AI Diary, WatchGPT, Human Actually, Calorie Counter, AI Usage, Color Clock, the Audio Visualizer Suite, and the arcade studies Vectronix and Radial Drift — appear in the minor arcana below. Each card opens the working product.

The craft is the same it has always been — pay attention, name what is wrong, fix it, and then fix it again, with feeling. What changed is the partner at the bench: a model, a context window, a working tool. He is fluent in that conversation. He refuses the average answer the model would otherwise give — not in spite of the tool but in full service of it.