Principal Product Designer

Software should feel physical.

I've built design systems and visual languages at Credit Karma, Patreon, Zillow, Fitbit, and Cooper. The part I care about most is the half-pixel: the easing curve, and the way a button pushes back when you press it. Right now I'm designing agentic experiences, shipping native Mac apps, and teaching designers to build with AI. Taste is a skill.

Los Altos, California --:-- open to interesting problems View résumé →
Work

Things I've shipped

The Lab

Built for the joy of it. Open source where it helps.

Toolchain

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.

  1. 01

    Explore

    • Claude
    • Obsidian
    • Paper

    Cheap ideas, lots of them. Volume beats precision here.

  2. 02

    Direction

    • Figma
    • Illustration
    • After Effects

    Make the feel decidable. One sharp reference beats ten mood boards.

  3. 03

    Build

    • SwiftUI
    • React · Next.js
    • Tailwind · TypeScript

    Real code, on the hardware it ships on.

  4. 04

    Polish

    • Motion Design
    • Design Tokens

    Easing curves, optical alignment, click sounds.

  5. 05

    Ship

    • Vercel
    • GitHub

    A live URL is the receipt.

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.

Experience

Where I've worked

2025 — ∞

Intuit (Credit Karma)

Principal Product Designer

Since Aug 2026 · Oakland

Senior Staff Product Designer

1y 3m · Oakland
  • 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 get working prototypes onto real hardware.
  • 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.
2022 — 2025

Patreon

Product Designer

2y 8m · SF Bay Area
  • Three roles in one tenure: visual design, then design systems, then UX lead on high-impact features.
  • Visual language modernization: evolved the product identity into a more expressive, accessible 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.
2020 — 2022

Zillow Group

Design Manager, Design Systems

2y 9m · SF Bay Area
  • 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 involved from the start.
2017 — 2020

Trulia

Lead Visual Designer

2y 7m · San Francisco
  • 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.
2016 — 2017

Fitbit

Lead Visual Designer

1y 3m · SF Bay Area
  • Led the visual language and design system for Fitbit Premium, a personalized health platform that was unannounced at the time.
2011 — 2016

Cooper

Principal Visual Designer

4y 7m · SF Bay Area
  • 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.
1996 — 2011

The Agency Years

Sr. Art Director, Cobra Creative

2006 — 2011 · 4y 9m
  • 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

2001 — 2006 · 5y 4m
  • 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

1999 — 2001 · 2y
  • Brand and interaction design at the height of the first web boom: style guides and UI guidelines across cross-functional teams.

Designer, Learn2.com

1996 — 1998 · 2y
  • Lead illustrator on interactive training tutorials, streaming multimedia when the web shipped on CD-ROM.
Education

Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design, Visual Communication

Say hi

or open your mail app ↗

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

  • No framework, no build step. Markup, taste, and Claude Code.
  • ⌘K anywhere · D toggles the lights · G then W jumps to work.
  • Open the console. There's something in there for you. ⌥⌘I