Origin Story

As a Boy

Growing up in New York, I watched my dad work as a graphic designer in the music industry. I was fascinated by the way he organized type and imagery for his rockstar clients.

I wanted to follow in his footsteps. In my pre-teens I used the equipment in his office and the paste-up techniques I'd learned over his shoulder to design an indie zine. It was awful but I didn't care. I was hooked.

Around the same time I got my first computer, a Commodore 64, and was captivated by its nerdy creative potential. I taught myself BASIC and wrote my first program at twelve, a text-adventure game I gave away to my friends.

I didn't know it then, but that early pull toward design and technology would set the course for everything after.

Career Beginnings

By the time I was 17, I was designing flyers for local bands and menus for restaurants in Miami. The work was fun and educational, but it wasn't the career I was looking for.

As luck would have it, a local newspaper was reviewing a stage play I'd designed posters for. They were impressed by my creative work and my knowledge of traditional pasteup, and hired me on the spot as assistant to the Art Director.

My first job with The SunPost was a crash course in the newspaper industry. Under wonderful mentors, I started by designing advertising layouts and operating a stat-camera. Over time I became the Assistant Art Director, responsible for the layout of the entire paper.

Of all the skills I'm grateful to have learned at The SunPost, the most lasting was time management. Weekly print deadlines hammered it in, and it has stuck with me ever since.

From Print to Pixels

While I was hitting my stride as The SunPost's Assistant Art Director, I spent my off-hours exploring a new technology called the World Wide Web. It combined my two passions, technology and design, and I was fascinated.

In my spare time I built my first website. A personal blog that showed off my design work. This was rare in those days. Even Geocities had yet to launch. For me it was an exercise in learning to design and code for the web. Unbeknownst to me, someone was taking notice.

Out of the blue, I got an email from the company that hosted my site. They'd seen my work, were impressed, and asked if I was interested in designing websites for their clients. I jumped at it. That's where my digital design career began.

I was soon designing websites for restaurants, retailers, and magazines, and loving every moment. My career was blossoming alongside the Internet itself, and I was learning every day.

I'm proud to have been among the early practitioners of web and mobile design. My curiosity and care have kept me ahead of ever-evolving trends, tools, and best practices through every chapter since.

20 Year Career with Vulcan

After two years of getting my feet wet in digital design, I received a call from Vulcan Inc., Paul Allen's Seattle management company. They'd seen my work online and were looking for someone to help bring Mr. Allen's vision to the Web.

I joined Vulcan in 1997 as Webmaster. Two years later I was given the chance to build a team from scratch as the new Director of Web Development & Interface Design.

Over the next two decades I led the conception and delivery of remarkably varied digital experiences. Mobile apps for media watching, responsive websites for philanthropic causes, practical home automation tools, engaging museum kiosks. The Fayve media app earned a perfect 10/10 UI score from CNET. The Science Fiction Museum's touchscreens reached 700,000+ visitors a year. EarthRanger, our conservation platform, is now used by 200+ wildlife organizations worldwide.

Along the way I scaled from individual contributor to leading a team of sixteen designers, researchers, and developers across 40+ products and a $2M operational budget. I established Vulcan's enterprise UX research practice with a dedicated lab. An in-house capability that eliminated our reliance on outside research vendors and trimmed roughly $250,000 from the annual research budget.

I'm remarkably grateful for the opportunities, growth, relationships, trust, and experiences Vulcan provided me. Eventually, it was time for a change.

Taking Off with Boeing

After a couple of years of independent consulting, I joined The Boeing Company's Digital Transformation Environment as a User Experience Lead. The role pulled in three directions, and I'm grateful for all of them.

I guided the next generation of Boeing designers toward modern, user-centered practices. Fulfilling work that paid forward what mentors had given me at The SunPost and Vulcan.

I also led a team of four designers building a portfolio of software for four distinct audiences. The flight-simulator instructors, the pilots they were training, the airlines paying for the program, and the Boeing teams running it internally. We shipped real-time instructor feedback tools that let trainers guide pilots through complex scenarios mid-flight, alongside pilot evaluation interfaces that made competency assessment clear for airline compliance managers worldwide.

And I led the redesign of Boeing's InfoSec single sign-on system, the gateway 1,000+ engineers used to access the tools they needed to build airplanes. I conducted 100+ usability studies with frustrated engineers, turning their pain points into a streamlined workflow that reduced access time from weeks to hours. Along the way I co-chaired Boeing's ResearchOps committee, establishing human-centered methods that were adopted across the company's global UX design organization.

It was the kind of work that doesn't make headlines but quietly compounds. I learned to read large organizations, to keep design rigor alive at scale, and to make the case for UX to people who hadn't yet seen what good UX could do.

Scaling Tax Tech

I joined LumaTax in 2021 as the first UX hire. Fintech startup, ten people, trying to fix one of the most hated parts of running a business. Tax compliance.

The first year was scaffolding. Personas, journey maps, a design system, a small usability lab. I designed Client Connect, a collaborative workspace where accountants and their clients could finally see the same screen at the same time. On the side I produced every marketing asset the company needed to find its first thousand customers.

In 2023 we were acquired by Taxually, a 150-person tax compliance company operating across Europe. The design practice I'd built for ten suddenly belonged to an organization fifteen times that size. Somewhere in that stretch I designed the Stripe integration that made the combined company Stripe's official tax filing partner, the same integration that was later spotlighted on the main stage at Stripe Sessions 2025. Customer acquisition went from 200 to 1,500 a month.

What I learned in those four years. A small design team, a tight partnership, and a real constraint will out-ship a large team and a clean brief every time.

Solo Velocity

I joined a pinball league in Seattle called Monday Night Pinball. Four hundred competitors, ten-plus seasons of results, no decent way to find your numbers.

I built Pinpoint in three weeks. Material UI sketch on Saturday. Figma on Sunday. Figma Make. Then React on Next.js, on Vercel, with Claude Code writing alongside me. I'd lay out a screen and we'd ship the working version the same afternoon. Players had it by the next match.

The shift wasn't the tools. The shift was that I stopped pushing pixels into mockups and started directing a system that responded. Design happened in the live product, not in a Figma file waiting on a developer.

I formed Play Pit LLC during the release because Pinpoint deserved a real home, and because the same compressed loop felt like a model worth running again. There's a board (small, smart, opinionated) and a playbook for moving products from idea through review and into the world. Three more products are lined up behind Pinpoint.

What's Next

I'm in the most generative stretch of this work.

The tools changed. Sketch became Figma. Figma became Figma plus Claude Code. The deploy button moved from FTP to Vercel. The work didn't change. The work is still listening carefully, framing the problem honestly, and shipping something that earns its place in someone's day.

I'm looking for the team that wants both. The leadership of someone who has scaled organizations from ten to a thousand, and the velocity of a builder who can ship a production platform in three weeks.

If that's you, let's talk.