Nice to meet you.
I'm Dennis Covent, a seasoned designer and creative thinker.
My journey is marked by resilience and a rapid learning ability, enriched by over 15 years of adapting to technological and industry shifts.
Over the last few years, I have developed a deep familiarity with AI, paired with a keen intuition for where things are going.
Let's dive in.
Dennis
Covent
Coming from an agency doing design services work, I thought I knew a thing or two about designing products. Boy, was I in for a ride. For the last 5 years, I worked on several products in our suite of investment products; Self Investor, a self-execution investing platform, Robo Advisor, an automated investing platform, and StoryTeller, a hyper-personalized and narrative-based portfolio performance reporting tool.
1 & 2. Advanced Design System: Since we are building B2B white-label solutions, we had to create an highly advanced design system in order to be scalable, highly configurable and offer a lot of variations possibilities for clients to adapt to their brand.
3 & 4. StoryTeller: On-demand, hyper-personalised and narrative-based portfolio performance reporting. Learn more
As Lead Designer and later as Chief Design Officer, my responsibility was to design scalable products (our products are B2B white label), with a human way of designing not seen before in the WealthTech sector. Everything we designed was with the end-user in mind. "Could the average Joe understand this? How does he feel when he sees this? And can we delight him by anticipating his needs even before he knows them?"
In a product company, you can make an actual difference in your product thinking because you have the time to work on these things, you have the data to validate or learn from these things, and you have the market (our clients and prospects) who validate your actions.
Together with a few core people at InvestSuite, we had the eagerness to learn new things and to combine it with creative thinking. This led to an endless stream of new ideas and concepts. To validate these concepts and to bring a bit of structure to them, we set up an Imagineering unit, which I led as well. The whole point was to test our concepts, some in design, some in working prototypes.
Walt Disney said it perfectly: "There’s really no secret about our approach. We keep moving forward- opening up new doors and doing new things- because we’re curious. And curiosity keeps leading us down new paths. We’re always exploring and experimenting. We call it Imagineering- the blending of creative imagination with technical know-how."
StoryTeller Podcast: This is a fully automated podcast generated based on the contents of your investment portfolio. StoryTeller produces a JSON containing insights; based on this data, we create a podcast briefing and script, generate the voices, and compose custom music.
AI Lexicon: This prototype demonstrates how Generative AI can function within a strictly controlled environment, utilizing a limited data source. The AI is designed not to hallucinate, which is crucial in a self-execution platform where the service cannot offer 'advice'.
That Imagineering approach became a really integral part of my way of working. So, over the past 5 years, I worked on 3 products for over a dozen clients and worked very closely with engineers on implementing various AI-related cool stuff. From designing the outcome of very contained and straightforward small algorithms to the more fancy things with the help of generative AI. We served clients in the Middle East, Europe, Asia, and the US. I traveled the world doing design workshops and made sure our products could both serve clients and be scalable as well on our end (again, white-label B2B mode).
I always end up being very close to the key people in a company. I'm not chasing management roles, but I like to help as much as possible where I can in a company, and usually, that entrepreneurial spirit is valued by others. That's why I became part of the management as well.
Antwerp
So the agency work. This was a great time because we worked for clients from various sectors and I could help build more than 200 apps we delivered during that 7-year period.
I grew from being the only designer in the company to building a team of 8 designers.
Later on, I joined the management and became a partner. icapps became a team of 120 people at the time.
A few of the amazing clients included Tomorrowland, KBC Bolero, Telenet, Proximus, Philips Hue, Bridgestone, KLM, Luminus, Keytrade,...
Being able to work in all these various sectors was eye-opening as you are making different decisions for a worker inspecting trains in an outside environment compared to millions of people using the Tomorrowland app or someone in her couch watching TV with the apps we developed. We did everything design-related, from user interviews and testing to animations, 3D work,... the whole shebang in design work.
This is a small agency, but I preferred to start working instead of further wasting time in school. Yes, I'm a school dropout as you can call that. That 2-year head start was really key in my personal development as a designer.
I worked for over 5 years already on home projects and a small business of selling website designs. So leaving school, where I didn't learn a thing I could use in practice, was the best decision I could make at that time.
"You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life." - Steve Jobs
I'm ready to create a new dot.
