I have a habit of showing up right as a platform is still wet clay.
It started at San Francisco State University, in the Design and Industry department studying multimedia at a moment when multimedia for the internet was still new and I had to create a custom degree to wrap around emerging media design.
I created a hybrid degree in Instructional Technical Writing and Graphic Design/Authoring for Multimedia. The Instructional Technical Writing taught me to organize subject matter, identify the subject matter experts, and to always be onboarding, gathering and logically outlining new information, giving it structure, and synthesizing it into new material. All with the goal of creating something easily understood by its intended audience, so they can do something that is clear to them.
That instructional synthesis thinking became part of my creative lens for designing things. Tech is always new and needs explaining, especially online. So, that pattern never really stopped. Instead of specializing in a fixed discipline, I kept designing for the web, ending up on the frontier of whatever the internet was building next — always synthesizing a lot of new information in order to design new things for a continuously evolving environment.
There's always a next new thing in tech and design, always making it creatively interesting to me. Right now it's the current generation of AI. Early in my career it was touch tablets, and before that, social platforms, and before that, the web itself. Whatever the emerging tech, my projects have been high-visibility, shipped, seen-by-the-world work, often created before there was a process, template or best practices for how to do it.
Early web and social
I created the visual design for one of the first branded instant messaging environments, for Yahoo Instant Messenger, at a time when Yahoo was the highest-trafficked site in the world. I created interactive ads for major brands — Walmart, Walgreens, Coca-Cola, and others — on the Yahoo homepage, working within specs and constraints that were in constant evolution.
Around the same time, I created the first Facebook and Apple brand-integration mockup, for the moment Facebook opened beyond students to the wider world. Facebook had no brand identity guidelines yet, and I created an interactive presentation for them, synthesizing what I thought their brand could look like, integrating video, designed to explain what Facebook was to an outside online audience for the first time. Not long after, the company received billion-dollar acquisition offers — and that explainer piece was part of how they told their story to the world.
PayPal and Publicis
PayPal brought in Publicis — the largest advertising agency in the world — to lead a global rebrand. I worked as Art Director, Interactive Designer, and UX/UI on that engagement, wearing whichever hat a given piece of work required. I designed and delivered the wireframes and pixel-perfect, high-fidelity interactive templates that shipped live on PayPal.com, visible to the entire world.
The platform itself was established, but the brand and environment specs were continually evolving. Some of the most interesting problems were technical-creative hybrids: I created the motion graphics for PayPal's holiday shopping campaign, integrating footage from the campaign photoshoot, and had to design that motion to work inside email — a medium whose spec for motion I was establishing. I had a hand in the concept, taglines, fonts, color palette, and motion elements across the rebrand. I also worked on an interactive video experience for PayPal's student accounts section, animating scenes — smoke rising from a dad's grill in one — layered over live-action footage and wrapped in a shell optimized to go live on the site.
Replicon
Fresh off PayPal, I joined Replicon, a successful, established time-and-attendance software company from Calgary that had come to the Bay Area to leverage the talent there to modernize its product design. I worked hands-on with the co-CEOs and the new product and marketing teams, touching everything from brand and UX to UI and taxonomy.
Replicon wasn't a new platform — but the discipline I was applying to it was still forming. Screen by screen, I onboarded to the product with engineering, while simultaneously building out visual templates — establishing visual pacing, contrast standards, a semantic color palette — the kind of systemized design thinking that would later become standard practice inside complex UI libraries and branded design systems. At the time, none of that existed yet in any formalized way for this emerging touch screen/browser environment. I was synthesizing all the brand and product information, and building a design rationale around trust into the product identity as I went.
Federal and institutional design
I spent a few years in Washington, DC, designing interactive for an instructional design firm creating educational content for the federal government, international banking institutions, and universities. Here it wasn't the platform that was new — it was the evolving standards governing it. My work usually started with instructional text, which I turned into high-fidelity, web-friendly interactive designs meeting emerging accessibility web standards that the federal government itself was still in the process of adopting. Clients included the Consumer Product Safety Commission, NHTSA, NASA, the NEA, the Indiana University Center on Congress, and the Inter-American Development Bank. No two projects looked alike.
Cloudon
Around 2010, when the iPad was brand new and there was still no touch-native version of Microsoft Word, I worked as part of a product design team on designing the UI for a document creation tool built for that new form factor. I brought together emerging platform human interface guidelines, my study of human factors and persuasion design, a background in instructional and technical writing for multimedia, and hands-on experience with illustration, vector/SVG work, and JavaScript and the browser DOM — all synthesized into a product built for a device category that didn't have design precedent yet.
Where I am now
Every one of these projects has looked different on the surface, especially because trends, aesthetics and tools evolve. What's constant underneath is the same design process and lens I've always used: continuous learning, design synthesis, close attention to human factors, high-fidelity aesthetics, brand trust rationale, design thinking, and a design eye tuned to platforms that are continuously evolving and still being defined.
Whenever I've been part of a design team, I've naturally gravitated toward and focused on the front end and high-fidelity design part of the project — the live stuff ultimately seen by the audience, the aesthetic, the visual language, the styling, the brand structure and visual language, the ui design system — sometimes building it myself, end to end, with no hard line between design and code. I generally create high-fidelity artifacts that are guided by a strong design rationale, one that is transparent and able to be tested and continually evolved by the team.
AI is the emerging tech I'm currently exploring. I've spent years pushing and pulling on it as LLM tools emerged — testing what it can produce and at what fidelity, automation, visual consistency, animation, design languages, APIs, design tools, imagery, video, code, monetization, and workflows.
The working hypothesis is that AI enables me to do more. To explore that, I built a brand. It's one of many design sandboxes I've created. It's the same interest that's driven every project before this one: explore the emerging platforms while they are still being invented, onboard, learn continuously, give new information structure, synthesizing it into new things for a new audience. In short, learn continuously, synthesize creatively, following the relevant path toward the goal. Be transparent with the design rationale, and expect it to evolve.
That exploration is ongoing in All The Amazing Things, a brand I built to explore generative imagery involving products in live scenarios, AI visual search, and shoppable commerce across YouTube, Pinterest, TikTok, and Amazon. I chose a non critical path subject matter for many reasons. Instead, the subject I chose follows my visual design fun flow — interior design and fashion, building out the brand and visual world with AI and non AI tools.
One interesting challenge I've found while exploring generative imagery and visual search systems is that they are are built around two different goals — one optimizes for human perception, one for machine classification — and a brand living across both has to satisfy both at once. I layered this over another emerging challenge: synthetic character design. Using AI LoRAs, I created Astrid, a fully fine-tuned AI persona and interactive character as a digital editor for the brand, able to help with your design projects. Visual consistency across all the tools and platforms and outputs is always the goal. And, with AI it's an interesting challenge to keep one product visually exact across different outputs, and to meet all the evolving platform regulations.
Like most of my previous design work, a lot of AI in design scenarios don't have established best practices to build a proven design rationale — they are still being written (sometimes synthetically, requiring validation effort). But so was the web when I started, and social platforms, and touch UI, etc. I’ve spent my career in that environment: walking into projects with no fixed rules, absorbing complex information quickly, synthesizing it into structure, and creating high-fidelity work for real audiences. If your team is creating what doesn't have a name yet, I can help. Reach out to me on LinkedIn to start the conversation.