👋🏻 Howdy
I’ve been designing applications, software, and websites for over 13 years, with experience in both agency and client-side environments.
My enthusiasm as a designer revolves around taking complex problems and streamlining or simplifying them with engaging visual solutions, emphasizing clarity and ease-of-use at the center of the user’s experience. I’ve also taught myself front-end development in this time, and being able to find design solutions in code has sustained my enthusiasm for making things accessible and beautiful.
In my spare time, you can find me doing what most aging punk clichés do: film photography, record collecting, hiking, drinking coffee, and riding my bike all over New York City.
My Design Principles
Human-Centered Design
Most great designs are grounded to a core underlying concept that has its roots in business or customer insights, which in turn allows anything built from that concept to be made with meaning and integrity. This approach to idea and execution should always work alongside the needs and experience of its audience. Great design- design that is striking, persuasive, pleasurable, transformative, and responsible- always requires a human touch. It ensures that designs can been seen and experienced by larger audiences and translate into healthier business outcomes. These are designs that always put people first.
Accessibility
The tasks designers get asked to solve are increasingly complex, which lead me to learning more about accessibility standards for the web. Practices like contrast checks, navigability, text readability, alt text for images, and inclusionary language are all small steps to ensure designs can be experienced by the most people possible. The internet is the greatest information resource in history and I believe anything designed for it should be easily usable by anyone.
Responsible AI
At this point, AI in design isn't going to slow down, so I have an evolving list of things I’ve been keeping in mind as I’ve begun learning more about these tools and integrating them into my design process in a (hopefully) ethical fashion:
Pros
- Using AI plugins to automate repetitive tasks (duplicating flows with context adjustments, labeling/organizing components for dev handoff, etc) across a project’s lifecycle speeds stuff up and leaves more room for creativity
- If part of a flow/frame is stumping me, a prompt can provide a helpful jumping off point to creating a bespoke solution
- Learning more about tools like Loveable or Cursor is necessary to stay on top of where software might be headed (and take a bit of the front-end headaches out of my hands)
Cons
- AI design tools, LLMs, and a lot of their associated resources operate on stolen assets and data that produce results that are still extremely biased, inaccurate, and inaccessible
- AI isn’t always needed in the design process, especially since using these things is shown to undermine our intellectual development and creative curiosity. Yeah, it can get made fast...but will it be good?
- Vibe coding produces tons of junk code, isn't always scalable, and it shows a lack of faith in your developers
- These platforms are more destructive than fossil fuels and we should use them cautiously