Aaron Makaruk

Product Designer & Design Engineer · Denver

I design the system and ship the features that run on it.

Ten years of product design at scale. At Lowe's I shipped flagship features on a $2B-a-year platform: the Paint Configurator, MyLowe's Home, Inbox, Apple Pay. I also led the design system all of them run on, and built it as a design engineer, so the hands that draw a component also ship it, in SwiftUI, Jetpack Compose, Flutter, or on the web. Before that, two hardware products from concept to market.

$2B/yr
Platform revenue
16M
Downloads
4M
Monthly users
1M+
System uses per year
2,000
Devices in 40 countries
10+
Years shipping product

Rated a top designer at Lowe's in back-to-back years, the highest rating in their annual review. Read the references on LinkedIn (opens in a new tab).

Featured inWIRED (opens in a new tab) · The Guardian (opens in a new tab) · Newsweek (opens in a new tab) · Popular Science (opens in a new tab) · Fast Company (opens in a new tab)

RecognitionShuttleworth Fellow (opens in a new tab) · EU-funded R&D (opens in a new tab) · TEDx Madrid (opens in a new tab) · Boomtown & Brinc accelerators · Funded on Kickstarter & Indiegogo (opens in a new tab)

Selected Work

Hive Story on desktop and phone over an apiary at sunset: the colony called Happy Hive, its day written out in plain language, and a field to log, plan or ask a question

Current Work · 2026 – Present

Hive Story

Beekeeping apps are forms and charts. This one writes each colony a story: what state it is in, what to do next, and why.

Designed it, then shipped it in Flutter

Two phones on a blue ground: the MyLowe's Home dashboard for 123 Pleasant Lane with its home maintenance list, and a Replace HVAC Filter guide with time, cost, and difficulty

Shipped · Lowe's · 2025 – 2026

MyLowe's Home

Designing a home management feature for the Lowe's app, iOS and Android.

Lists and profiles from one dashboard

Lowe's mobile design system on a slate ground: phone and tablet navigation bars in every variant (back button, title, subtitle, tabs and action buttons) over the typography and icon-color sub-components they are built from

Shipped · Lowe's · 2022 – 2026

Lowe's Design Systems

The foundation a $2B app with no design system now runs on: semantic tokens, two platform-native SDKs, Code Connect, and the governance that made it stick.

1M+ uses per year16M+ downloads

Desktop and phone of the Paint Configurator on a beige ground: living-room preview with Calm Cream, a color grid, and finish options

Shipped · Lowe's · 2024

Paint Configurator

See any paint color on a room: search or browse the range against it, then configure the product and buy without leaving the flow.

Color → configuration → checkout

Three BuzzBox Mini units, each an integrated solar panel and sensor board, resting on a weathered hive lid in a meadow

2017 – 2022

OSBeehives

Co-founded a bee-health platform. Two hardware products, concept to market, in beekeepers' hands on six continents.

2,000 devices40 countries

Nine hexagonal plywood planters mounted as a honeycomb array on a dark painted brick wall outside a building

2014 – 2017

AKER Kits

Twenty-plus open-source flat-pack kits, each cut from a single sheet of plywood and assembled without a fastener.

20+ products5,000+ customers

Interface Studies

Self-directed concept work.

About

I keep closing the distance between a drawing and a thing that exists.

The materials change: plywood, then sensors, then a component library, then Flutter widgets. The work underneath has not changed in fifteen years. Most designers pick a side of that gap; I have never been able to stay on one.

Every project I have chosen points at the physical world: machines a person could build themselves, food you could grow on a balcony, the health of the insects that pollinate the food supply. I care about nature, and software is the most leveraged tool I have for doing anything about it.