About Kyra
Kyra Pieterse is a South African designer, illustrator and co-founder of Divi Den and MaxiBlocks, with more than 25 years of design experience. She has been designing and building websites for clients since 1999, working through successive generations of web technology—from Dreamweaver and Flash to WordPress and visual website builders. Her career includes work on major accounts such as Virgin and Nokia Siemens Networks, alongside projects for smaller businesses and independent clients.
How it began
Her background spans agency work, freelancing, print and digital design. She began in e-learning, creating animated biology diagrams in Flash. Later, while volunteering at Hope Center in Huế, Vietnam, she contributed everything from a website and visual identity to shop design, uniforms and handicraft products. Requests from other local NGOs helped turn that volunteer work into Yeah Can, a design business she developed with her husband, Christiaan, and her mother, Anja. After moving to Europe, the team built it into a studio providing web design services to other agencies.
Building Divi Den
Divi Den grew directly from that experience. Kyra recognised a gap between attractive design mockups and the work required to turn them into functioning websites. Her idea was to combine editable Photoshop design files with ready-built Divi layouts, helping designers move more easily from client approval to a finished site. Early experiments with free layouts developed into a product business, launching in 2017 and later expanding into Divi Den Pro.
Creating MaxiBlocks
The same practical approach led to MaxiBlocks. Years of making layouts and answering support questions revealed a recurring frustration: customers loved the designs but struggled with the CSS and classes needed to customise them. When Gutenberg arrived, Kyra and the team began building their own solution. Her experience designing in Photoshop inspired a flexible grid and a small set of powerful building blocks. They started with style cards to simplify everyday changes such as colours and typography. MaxiBlocks grew from her desire to create expressive websites and give other designers the tools to do the same.
Learning through play
Her illustration work includes Passport to Padel Juniors, for which she created characters and card layouts that turn coaching instructions into playful learning activities. She also designed and built the Padel Skill Cards website.
A slowmad at heart
Away from work, Kyra describes herself as a “slowmad,” spending extended periods in different countries across Africa, Europe and Asia. Wherever she goes, her cat travels with her.