I've been designing for 25 years. Sort of. The real story is messier.

I started in a print shop in 2001, fixing files in pre-production. That turned into graphic design, marketing, and illustration work until 2009, when the Great Recession took the job. So I worked in a bike shop, taught myself HTML and CSS, and freelanced on the side. Went back to school to teach. Only found substitute work. Kept freelancing. In 2015 I landed back in design full time, doing UX and coding the front-end of every site we built. That's the career I'm still in. Eventually I moved toward the UX and away from the engineering, but the building never stopped.

What I'm actually interested in is the moment where a good idea becomes a real thing. All the collaboration, arguing, scrapping, and rebuilding that happens in between.

I keep a Field Notes notebook in my pocket, but it's not where ideas live. It's for scribbles. A layout I think of while I'm out. A possible fix for a work problem. Real ideas get logged in Gary, the second brain app I built, so I can look for patterns and figure out which ones are worth building.

The scribbles pay off in connections. Someone in a meeting mentioned, off-topic, that teams were starting to build internal tools. I wrote it down. A few days later, in a different meeting: the design org needs visibility beyond the product org. Wrote that down too. Then the pattern clicked. We had two internal tools in flight, on two different stacks, with two different design systems to maintain. And design was brought into both too late to change any of it. So I took the problem to leadership. Discussions are underway to unify the internal codebase and design system, with design in the mix from the start this time.

I like to have a few irons in the fire. I get bored working on small iterations and features for months at a time. I need to see the big picture. What's it all for? How do the pieces fit together? How does this work coexist with the work happening on other teams, and is there an opportunity to collaborate with them?

"10 good ideas, quickly, is better than one great idea that takes you all year."

Your process shouldn't be a trap. A good designer knows when to lean on intuition and expertise, and when they need to think it through more thoroughly. And it's not a checklist. That kind of tunnel vision makes you miss new opportunities to improve how you work.

Like I did with AI. My process isn't a checklist, so when I saw an opportunity to wonder if I could prototype directly in Cursor instead of Figma, I tried it. Turns out I could. That one question changed how I work, how my whole design team works, and eventually led to me pushing code to a production database. Zoro had never let a designer do that before.

Meetings are a cost, and costs need to be managed. A whiteboarding session with 10 people, for half a day, can easily cost the company thousands. So you better have a good plan, and you better come out of it with actionable ideas.

But working in a vacuum will suffocate you. I need other people to talk things out with, bounce ideas off of, collaborate closely with. The best ideas don't happen in the shower. Sparks happen in a shower. The people you share that spark with can help turn it into something great.

"Design isn't colors and fonts. It's how people interact with your brand, how you create trust, how you shape the journey."

I don't always want to create 500 screens in Figma, because sometimes I just need to see some ideas in a working website or app. Design some rough ideas, build them in Cursor, see how they feel as you actually interact with them.

I don't just want to make things and go home. I want to have fun making things. I want to enjoy talking to my team, hear about their work, see their designs, share mine, and build something great together.

Outside of work

I'm a dad and a husband. My day mostly belongs to work and family, so me-time is a workout at lunch and one hour after everyone's asleep. Some nights that hour goes to a book or a show. Some nights it goes to building. This week it went to a front-end for Gary, so my whole family can use it to add books and movies to our lists, or find a recipe. I used to teach, and I loved it. Teaching is a lot like building. The thing you're building is your students' curiosity. I wouldn't go back, but the skills came with me. I present well, I tell a decent story, and I can explain complicated things simply.