Senior Staff Product Designer
Software should feel physical.
Twenty-five years of visual language and design systems: Credit Karma, Patreon, Zillow, Fitbit, Cooper. I obsess over the details most people ship past: the optical alignment, the easing curve, the half-pixel. Lately: designing agentic experiences, and teaching designers to build with AI. Taste is a skill.
From CD-ROM to AI.
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1996
CD-ROM
First interactive work shipped on plastic, before CSS existed.
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1999
Dot-com
Brand and interaction at AGENCY.COM, the height of the first web boom.
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2001
Agency
Art direction for NFL, Verizon, Microsoft. Flash-era craft.
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2011
Studio
Principal at Cooper, the studio that wrote the book on interaction design.
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2016
Product
Fitbit, Trulia, Zillow, Patreon, Credit Karma. Systems for millions.
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2024
AI
Prototypes that run on real devices. Teaching designers to build.
Live on the internet.
Forrrge
Describe an icon, forge the real thing. A native Mac playground for turning rough ideas into app icons. Prompt, compare, export.
Pixxxel
Roll eight traits, lock the ones you like, reroll the rest — every render lands as clean 1-bit pixel art. A native Mac playground for pixel characters.
Disco Moose
Not every tool. The right ones. A design resource library of 400+ vetted tools, books, type, and inspiration.
The Lab
Built for the joy of it. No public links yet. Ask me for a demo.
SpriteForge
Node-based visual effects engine.
Argos
A reference library, native on macOS.
Vox
On-device dictation from the menu bar. Private by default.
Pattern Engine
A procedural pattern generator, sibling to Forrrge. Name under wraps.
Frontrow
A menu-bar app that makes sure you're never late to a meeting.
UX Critique
Design critique grounded in a 606-entry UX knowledge base. Cite or skip.
Tastemaker
A critique tool that teaches the craft floor and judges the taste above it.
Agentic Principles
Fifteen principles for designing agentic AI experiences, plus a critique skill that applies them.
Signal
An AI-native RSS reader: semantic search, digests, read-aloud. Parked, honestly.
The right tool at the right stage.
I wasted months looking for one tool that does everything. That tool doesn't exist. What works is the right tool at the right stage. Using Cursor for ideation is like writing a screenplay in Excel.
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01
Explore
- Claude
- Obsidian
- Paper
Cheap ideas, lots of them. Volume beats precision here.
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02
Direction
- Figma
- Illustration
- After Effects
Make the feel decidable. One sharp reference beats ten mood boards.
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03
Build
- SwiftUI
- React · Next.js
- Tailwind · TypeScript
Real code on real devices. Click-throughs don't count.
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04
Polish
- Motion Design
- Design Tokens
The half-pixel pass: easing, optical alignment, sound.
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05
Ship
- Vercel
- GitHub
Receipts: live URLs, not promises.
And when the right tool doesn't exist, I build it: Claude Code skills, a DESIGN.md spec for coding agents, the critique tools in the Lab.
The ledger.
Credit Karma
Senior Staff Product Designer
- Co-leading visual evolution and design system modernization for a financial product serving tens of millions.
- A fixture in the weekly AI + prototyping guild, helping designers build real prototypes on real devices, not click-throughs.
- Authored Principles for Designing Agentic AI Experiences: 15 principles distilled from 18 months of hands-on agentic design work.
- Hackathon runner-up, 2026, with an AI design-critique tool that took the event's top AI score.
Patreon
Product Designer
- Three roles in one tenure: visual design → design systems → UX lead on high-impact features.
- Visual language modernization: evolved the product identity into a more expressive, accessible, emotionally resonant system with brand and product partners.
- Design systems: translated that direction into tokenized, cross-platform components, working directly with engineers.
- Launched built-in livestreaming. UX strategy and mobile UI for creators going live on-platform: live video, chat moderation, community-to-content transitions.
Zillow Group
Design Manager, Design Systems
- Co-led an 18-person cross-functional team of designers and engineers on Global Patterns & Experiences in Zillow's design system.
- Evolved the visual language, principles, and frameworks with engineering and accessibility as first-class priorities.
Trulia
Lead Visual Designer
- Managed the Visual Design and Design System team of designers and engineers delivering across web and native.
- Partnered with brand to establish a new product visual language, shipped alongside Trulia's neighborly rebrand and the Neighborhoods editorial launch.
Fitbit
Lead Visual Designer
- Led the visual language and design system for Fitbit Premium, a personalized health platform that was unannounced at the time.
Cooper
Principal Visual Designer
- Led and mentored the visual design team at the studio that wrote the book on interaction design: standards, quality, and growing in-house talent.
- Lead visual designer on client work, including the National Pro Grid League fan experience, a 2015 Interaction Award winner.
- Paired with interaction designers so the visuals carried the intended behavior and emotional goals, not just the surface.
The Agency Years
Sr. Art Director — Cobra Creative
- Design lead for NFL Network, Verizon, Clif Bar, Asics, Cheetos, and Microsoft: cohesive visual languages for new interactive products.
- Ideation, storyboarding, and UI for mobile and web, including the NFL streaming beta.
Interactive Art Director — Bozell
- Lead UX/UI on the College World Series site for four straight years, and built and maintained its CMS.
- Owned projects end to end: research, usability, strategy, creative, production, plus a new corporate brand identity with senior leadership.
Art Director — Eagle River Interactive / AGENCY.COM
- Brand and interaction design at the height of the first web boom: style guides and UI guidelines across cross-functional teams.
Designer — Learn2.com
- Lead illustrator on interactive training tutorials, streaming multimedia when the web shipped on CD-ROM.
Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design, Visual Communication
Notes from the field.
Still here? You're either hiring or curious.
Off screen
- Builds arcade cabinets and mods retro game controllers when not pushing pixels.
- 1,000+ photos on Flickr as dangergraphics, a handle that predates Instagram.
This site
- Hand-built. No framework, no build step. Markup and taste.
- ⌘K anywhere · D toggles the lights · G then W jumps to work.
- Open the console. There's something in there for you. ⌥⌘I