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
A native Mac app for turning rough icon ideas into polished exports. Prompt, compare, ship.
Pixxxel
Roll traits, lock favorites, reroll the rest. A native Mac playground for clean 1-bit pixel characters.
PlainType
Paste clean text from messy copy. Local, private, tiny.
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. Open source where it helps.
Tastemaker
AI design critique that teaches measurable craft and evaluates taste in context.
Agentic Principles
A practical framework and AI skill for critiquing agentic experiences, oversight, trust, and consent.
UX Critique
KB-grounded UX critique with Figma cards and a browsable 606-entry knowledge base.
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.
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