01.
My Story
A knack for understanding people and problems. Mastery of craft. And a restless creative streak.
I aspire to design elegant, intuitive products that enrich people’s lives. I was first drawn to design out of a fascination with people, their stories, and their problems. Throughout my career, the drive to understand human behavior in all its myriad complexity has led me down many circuitous paths—acting, writing, filmmaking. But those paths always seem to lead back to design.
To be candid, I spent the past ten years as an actor and was more devoted to it than I had ever been to design. Through the daily practice of voice, speech, movement, and breath work, I learned to immerse myself in my craft. Then, in 2023, I gave up acting. It broke my heart, but I couldn’t make a living at it and I didn’t want to be a weekend warrior.
I had always seen design and acting as parallel lines that would never intersect. So I never expected acting skills to transfer to design. But the muscle memory of craft has endured. Not the specific skills, of course. But rather a newfound curiosity, patience, and rigor in my approach to technique, materials, and tools.
So, that's me. If you might want to work together, drop me a line. If you’d like to learn more about my three criteria for great design, read on.
02.
Strategy
Design is the bridge that connects strategy to exeuction.
My top priority as a designer is to identify and solve challenges that make organizations more profitable: Either by increasing revenue (attracting more and/or more valuable customers) or decreasing costs (improving efficiency and reducing waste). In either case, I work closely with product, sales, and marketing to understand how a given feature or initiative connects to the company's competitive strategy and macro goals.
These strategic goals provide the constraints and context within which to practice human-centered design. Competitive advantage not withstanding, no organization can remain profitable for long without understanding their customers' problems and needs.
It's a symbiotic relationship. Design needs strategy to plot a course through the competitive landscape. And strategy needs design (and engineering) to build, test, and iterate on their theories to outpace the competition.
03.
Quality
Care and quality are internal and external aspects of the same thing.
As Robert Pirsig writes in his classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, "A person who sees quality and feels it as he works is a person who cares. A person who cares about what he sees and does is a person who is bound to have some characteristic of quality."
What traits of a product imbue it with quality?
Utility—Is the output fit for its intended use?
Usability—Can customers accomplish tasks with minimal effort? Is the product learnable? That is, does it become easier to use over time?
Desirability—Are the details thoughtful and well-executed? Are users delighted by the way the product or service anticipates their needs?
04.
Craft
Craft is the process through which quality is expressed by the designer.
What aspects of craft are evident in the work of a designer who creates quality products?
Materials mastery—Understanding the formal properties of color, typography, code, and other digital design materials.
Attention to detail—There's a Shaker proverb, "Do not make something unless it is both necessary and useful; but if it is both, do not hesitate to make it beautiful." But beauty is more than aesthetics. Attending to an interface's every minute detail and how those individual parts form a seamless whole, is the designer's expression of Care.
Simplicity—Complexity is never just "removed." It is synthesized into simplicity when we prioritize, organize, combine, sacrifice, etc. These tasks demand holistic understanding of information architecture, copywriting, and the logic of user flows, in addition to UI design.
Consistency—Consistency equals predictability. But designers should never pursue consistency for its own sake. Rather, we must understand the morphology of patterns, knowing when to reuse them, when to vary them, and when to discard them and start from scratch.