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PixelsWithin / Los Angeles / Product design & development agency

Product design & development,shaped around your business.

PixelsWithin is a Los Angeles product design and development agency led by product engineer Diana Lopez. I learn how your business works, shape the right product, and bring it into the world—from strategy and interface through software, connected devices, launch, and iteration.

15+ years
shaping and shipping products
100K+
app users reached
$500K+
retail sales built alongside a product
5.0 / 8
Clutch rating and verified reviews
$500
fixed-price Product Discovery

The direct answer / 01

PixelsWithin helps established businesses, nonprofits, and product teams turn complicated operations or still-forming ideas into useful products and systems. The work can include product definition, UX, custom software development, connected experiences, digital transformation, workflow automation, AI products, and ongoing improvement.

I work directly across product definition, UX, architecture, and engineering. The person asking how your operation works is also the person deciding how the data should move, designing the interface, writing the code, and learning from the product after launch.

Engagements can begin with a $500 Product Discovery, then continue month to month. Choose $6,000 per month when your business needs to own the source code from the start, or $3,000 per month when PixelsWithin can own and manage the code. Compare the options.

A lot can fit inside one question

What can PixelsWithin help you build or change?

Turn a business problem, market opportunity, or early concept into a coherent digital or connected product. PixelsWithin connects product definition, customer experience, interaction design, technical architecture, implementation, launch, and iteration so the reason for building survives every stage.

The work can cross interfaces, software, physical devices, cloud services, and live data. It can begin before a complete brief exists and continue after real users replace assumptions with evidence. See how PixelsWithin works.

Design and build bespoke software around a business’s actual rules, workflows, users, and constraints. That can mean a new operational system, a customer-facing product, an internal tool, or a focused replacement for generic software that no longer fits.

PixelsWithin handles product definition, interaction design, architecture, engineering, launch, and ongoing improvement in one senior-led relationship. Explore custom software development.

Turn manual processes, aging tools, duplicate entry, and hard-to-explain business logic into a clearer digital system. The work begins with how the operation functions now—not with a predetermined platform or transformation theater.

The result may combine custom software, existing tools, integrations, and a staged rollout. See digital transformation services.

Modernize an old application without discarding the operational knowledge it contains. PixelsWithin can map dependencies, preserve important data and rules, improve the interface, replace fragile infrastructure, and plan a controlled migration.

The objective is safer change, not novelty for its own sake. Explore legacy modernization.

Connect tools and reduce the repetitive coordination that consumes staff attention: status updates, duplicate data entry, document movement, approvals, notifications, reporting, and the manual repair of disconnected systems.

Automation keeps consequential decisions visible while removing clerical friction. See workflow automation services.

Build secure web applications for customers, teams, or partners who need access to documents, status, records, requests, communication history, and next actions. The interface and its integrations are designed together so the portal does not create another manual system behind the scenes.

Explore client portal development.

Use AI where retrieval, synthesis, classification, drafting, or prediction can produce a measurable improvement. PixelsWithin defines the source of truth, acceptable error, review point, privacy boundary, and evidence of usefulness before choosing the model or interface.

Explore AI product development.

Get senior product and technical leadership without hiring a full-time executive. Diana connects business priorities to product scope, architecture, engineering tradeoffs, and hands-on delivery—then remains accountable after the recommendations are made.

Explore fractional product leadership.

Every engagement can begin with a fixed-price $500 Product Discovery. If the direction and relationship are right, continue month to month at $6,000 for client-owned software or $3,000 for managed software.

The difference is code ownership, not twice as much development. Review pricing and ownership.

Compare every service

Start with the business signal

You may need a new product or custom system when the workaround becomes the work.

The request often arrives as a noun: a dashboard, portal, app, integration, redesign, or AI feature. The more useful starting point is the condition producing that request.

PixelsWithin interprets the visible symptom, finds the business rule or information problem beneath it, and chooses a response that does not preserve the same friction inside a newer interface.

What you noticeWhat it may meanA useful responseWhat to resist
The spreadsheet has become the system.

Your temporary flexible tool now contains the business’s real categories, exceptions, and workflow—but it lacks reliable permissions, validation, history, and integrations.

Map the spreadsheet as an operational prototype, preserve the knowledge inside it, and replace only the complexity that has earned a more durable system.

Do not reproduce every accidental column and workaround. Some of the current process exists only because the spreadsheet could not support a better one.

Everyone is afraid to touch the old software.

The application probably holds undocumented rules, fragile dependencies, or institutional knowledge concentrated in one person.

Inventory the data, business rules, integrations, reports, failure consequences, and continuity requirements before choosing where modernization should begin.

A fresh interface is not a modernization strategy. Migration integrity and operational continuity carry more risk than visual age.

Customers keep asking staff for status.

The business knows something the customer cannot see, or information is distributed across tools without a trustworthy public boundary.

Create the smallest useful client view of status, documents, next actions, and communication, supported by integrations that keep it current.

Do not build a portal that staff must update manually. Visibility without integration simply transfers the burden.

The team says it needs to “add AI.”

There may be a real retrieval, drafting, classification, synthesis, or prediction problem underneath an imprecise technology request.

Name the human task, source material, acceptable error, review responsibility, privacy boundary, and measurable improvement before choosing a model.

Cheap generation can create expensive verification. Keep consequential judgment visible and accountable.

A promising idea cannot become a roadmap.

The opportunity may be carrying several audiences, business models, and value propositions at once without a decision about which risk comes first.

Use discovery to define the user, core change, riskiest assumption, smallest coherent experience, technical boundary, and learning sequence.

Do not turn uncertainty into an exhaustive feature inventory. A longer roadmap can hide the absence of a product decision.

Describe the signal you are seeing

Why senior-led continuity matters

The person who learns the business stays with the build.

Products lose coherence when context is compressed between roles. A stakeholder explains the business to a strategist. The strategist summarizes it for a designer. The designer turns the summary into screens. A manager converts the screens into tickets. An engineer receives a description of a decision without the evidence that made it sensible.

Some large programs require many specialized teams. Focused business systems often benefit from a shorter distance between observation and implementation. PixelsWithin keeps product direction, experience design, architecture, and engineering close enough that the reason for a feature can still change its final form.

That continuity is especially valuable when the brief is incomplete, the business logic contains exceptions, the old software holds years of operational memory, or the right answer will only become clear once people can react to something tangible.

Diana asks what people do outside the official process: the spreadsheet beside the platform, the text message after the form, the person who checks every result, and the step everyone calls temporary even though it has existed for six years. Those workarounds are evidence about the product.

The answer becomes a user flow, information model, interface, architecture, and working system. If implementation exposes a wrong assumption, the person who heard the original explanation is still present to revise it. There is no need to protect a strategy deck from reality.

This is also why fractional product leadership is not advice floating above delivery. Product choices create technical consequences, and technical constraints reshape product choices. The same senior counterpart remains accountable for both.

See how ambiguity becomes a working product

Verified experience and outcomes

Products used, revenue created, operations improved.

PixelsWithin brings more than 15 years of product design and engineering experience to each engagement. The examples below show consumer reach, operational improvements, public-interest infrastructure, client trust, and commercial clarity.

Each number matters because of the decisions behind it: what had to stay coherent, who needed to trust the result, and how the product connected to a larger business outcome.

Product + business100K+ users / $500K+ sales

Cute Tarot became more than an app.

Diana created Cute Tarot as a product ecosystem spanning iPhone and Android apps, publishing, ecommerce, and retail. The apps reached more than 100,000 users while the brand generated more than $500,000 in retail sales and earned distribution through Barnes & Noble.

The evidence is not only scale. It is the ability to hold product, technology, brand, customer experience, and commercial decisions together across several forms. See Diana’s role, product, and screenshots.

Public infrastructureUnicode Consortium

Technical depth made understandable.

Unicode supports the standards behind digital communication. Diana rebuilt its public website to make a vast body of technical material clearer for contributors, institutional stakeholders, sponsors, and ordinary visitors.

The work combined information architecture, product thinking, visual design, and front-end development. See the Unicode work and screenshot.

Operational speed1nHealth

Four clicks became one.

For a healthcare recruitment platform, Diana reduced a common messaging task from four clicks to one and accelerated an important lookup from roughly five seconds to half a second. See the role, process, and interface.

Experience15+ years

Product judgment built across industries.

Diana has worked across healthcare, payroll, tax, media, ecommerce, manufacturing, logistics, and nonprofits since 2009, including experience with Gusto, Vertex, DEFY Media, and Unicode.

That range matters because consequential products rarely belong to engineering alone. They touch training, customer expectations, data responsibility, operations, and change management.

PixelsWithin is independent so that experience can remain close to the actual decisions.

Verified clients8 reviews

5.0 on Clutch.

Verified reviews consistently describe responsiveness, strong understanding, high-quality execution, and the ability to improve an idea instead of merely following instructions.

Delivery modelOne senior counterpart

No strategy-to-engineering handoff.

The person learning the workflow remains present when scope becomes interface, interface becomes architecture, and architecture becomes code.

Fewer handoffs do not mean fewer disciplines. They mean less context lost between them.

LocationLos Angeles

Remote by default; close enough to visit.

PixelsWithin works with organizations across North America. Southern California teams can also bring the real operation into the room: the paper form, warehouse handoff, old database, or screen everyone has learned not to touch.

Commercial clarity$500 → $3K / $6K

A small beginning and visible choices.

Start with discovery before making a larger commitment. Continue month to month under a managed-software or client-owned model when the path is clear.

See the projects behind the evidence

$3,000 monthly / managed product delivery

Time is the most valuable resource.

A lower monthly commitment preserves runway—more time to learn, adjust, and build what proves useful.
See the $3,000 managed plan

One continuous engagement

From a messy situation to a product that can keep learning.

  1. 01

    Notice the real operation

    Look beyond the official process for repetition, delay, fragile knowledge, customer uncertainty, disconnected information, and the exceptions people have learned to carry manually.

  2. 02

    Define the useful change

    Name who needs the product, what should become easier or safer, which assumption creates the most risk, and the smallest coherent release capable of producing evidence.

  3. 03

    Design the system and its boundaries

    Make the important flows visible, decide how data and permissions should work, choose integrations and infrastructure, and avoid charging today’s business for every imaginary future.

  4. 04

    Build without losing the reason

    Turn the product decisions into something people can use while keeping feedback close enough to implementation that learning can still change the interface, architecture, and scope.

  5. 05

    Launch, maintain, and iterate

    Observe real behavior, resolve the friction that appears in use, protect the foundation, and choose each next improvement from better information than the project had at the beginning.

Explore the complete approach

The human advantage

When possibilities become cheap, choosing well becomes the work.

AI can produce research summaries, interface variations, code, and plausible answers faster than a traditional process. That changes the economics of making. It does not decide which answer deserves to become part of a business.

The hand represents agency: the ability to touch the work and change its shape. The brain is judgment: not merely generating possibilities, but choosing among them with context and consequence.

The wheel is leverage, the ancient promise that a tool can return effort to a person. Fire is transformation and risk together. Stars are orientation: signals that become useful when someone decides where to go.

PixelsWithin uses new tools aggressively while keeping a human accountable for the product, the architecture, the evidence, and the people who must live with the result.

Hand holding a star beside a brain, wheel, flame, and orbiting marks
Meet Diana and PixelsWithin

A useful fit

Best when the people who know the business can talk to the person building.

You do not need a perfect brief, internal product team, or technical vocabulary. You need a consequential problem, access to the people who understand it, and room for the answer to improve as we learn.

The model is deliberately close: one senior counterpart, visible commercial terms, direct feedback, and responsibility that continues into delivery.

01Business

There is something real to improve.

The strongest fit is an established business, nonprofit, or product team with an operation, audience, or opportunity that already matters.

You do not need a finished specification. You do need enough proximity to the work that we can observe reality instead of inventing it from a conference room.

02Problem

The obvious request may not be the answer.

You want someone who will examine the request, ask what outcome it is supposed to create, and challenge a feature when a smaller or more durable response would work better.

PixelsWithin is less useful when the only desired service is unquestioning production labor.

03Access

The people who know the work can participate.

The operator with the workaround, the manager accountable for the result, and the person serving the customer contain different parts of the product.

Access to those perspectives is more valuable than a polished brief assembled far away from the workflow.

04Authority

Decisions can reach the person building.

The model works best when feedback does not have to cross several detached approval layers before becoming a product decision.

Direct communication makes disagreement faster, preserves nuance, and keeps responsibility visible.

05Continuity

Launch is a beginning, not an exit.

Products become more truthful once people use them. Ongoing iteration lets the work respond to new evidence, operational change, maintenance needs, and the priorities that only become visible after release.

A month-to-month relationship protects that learning loop.

PixelsWithin is probably not the lowest-cost pair of hands for a predetermined specification. It is designed to be a high-context partner for deciding what deserves to be built and remaining accountable for making it real.
Decide whether fractional product leadership fits

The questions buyers should be able to answer before a call.

PixelsWithin starts with a fixed-price $500 Product Discovery. Ongoing product leadership, design, engineering, launch, and maintenance are $6,000 per month for client-owned software or $3,000 per month for managed software.

The managed option lowers the monthly price because PixelsWithin owns and manages the source code. The client-owned option makes future handoff straightforward from the beginning. See the complete pricing terms.

A finished brief is not required. Product Discovery is designed for an unclear opportunity, a persistent operational problem, a rough prototype, or a collection of stakeholder requests that has not yet become one coherent product.

Diana helps define the user, outcome, important flows, technical approach, risks, and recommended sequence before ongoing development begins.

PixelsWithin is an independent, senior-led product design and development agency founded by Diana Lopez. The engagement can function like a compact custom software agency or like fractional product and technical leadership, depending on what the business needs.

The defining feature is continuity: Diana learns the business, shapes the product, makes the architecture decisions, and stays hands-on in delivery.

Yes. The work can begin inside an existing application, codebase, workflow, vendor environment, or internal engineering organization. PixelsWithin can modernize a legacy system, improve a critical flow, create a new boundary around old infrastructure, or provide product direction for an existing team.

The first step is understanding ownership, dependencies, risk, and where a focused intervention can create useful leverage.

AI is used to accelerate research, synthesis, prototyping, testing, and implementation where it improves the work. It does not replace accountability for product decisions, architecture, privacy, correctness, or the consequences of what gets shipped.

When AI is part of the product itself, the engagement defines the source of truth, acceptable error, human review point, and evidence of value before treating generation as a feature.

Ongoing engagements include maintenance, fixes, product decisions, and continued development. Launch replaces some assumptions with real behavior, so the next useful improvements can be chosen from evidence instead of prediction.

PixelsWithin works month to month rather than requiring a long-term minimum. Hosting and third-party service obligations depend on the ownership model and the systems involved.

Read pricing and ownership in full

Clients notice the thinking around the code.

Notes in the margin are often where the actual product appears.

The core promise / 01

“She took our ideas and made them better.”

“She seemed to effortlessly understand what it was that we were looking for. She took our ideas and made them better.”

John G. McCabe
Senior Consultant, Decision Analysis Inc.

Product judgment / 02

“She would ask the right questions.”

“Diana would ask the right questions, which helped us reevaluate some of our ideas. We got the impression that she loves what she does—it’s not just code for her.”

Krishna Somandepalli
PhD Researcher, USC

Outcome / 03

“A jump in traffic and several new sponsorships.”

“We needed to update a 90s-era website to better engage with the general public, especially those using phones. We saw a jump in traffic and several new sponsorships.”

Greg W.
VP of Marketing, Unicode Consortium

Initiative / 04

“Fantastic ideas added along the way.”

“Once she had a clear understanding of our needs and the specific market we were targeting, she built the website, with fantastic ideas added along the way.”

Phil T.
CEO, Netovation Limited

Leverage / 05

“I can focus solely on what I do best.”

“Diana’s work has made a massive difference to my businesses. She has a keen eye and keeps up with all the latest trends. With Diana, I can focus solely on what I do best.”

Aaron I.
CEO, Contract.org

See what PixelsWithin has shipped

PIXELSWITHIN IS A LOS ANGELES PRODUCT DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT AGENCY LED BY DIANA LOPEZ. PRODUCT DIRECTION, UX, ARCHITECTURE, ENGINEERING, LAUNCH, AND ITERATION STAY CONNECTED SO ESTABLISHED BUSINESSES CAN TURN COMPLEX OPERATIONS AND AMBITIOUS IDEAS INTO USEFUL PRODUCTS AND SYSTEMS.

Make the important thing real.

Start with a $500 Product Discovery. Continue when the direction is clear.
Book a discovery call