Case study in progress.

I was employee number one, which is a polite way of saying there was no company yet.

XMTP was going after one of tech's most underexplored problems: private, secure, decentralized messaging. Backed by a16z crypto, Union Square Ventures, and Coinbase Ventures. The money was serious and the design language did not exist.

That's the part worth sitting on. Wallet-to-wallet messaging. AI-to-AI communication. Prediction markets. Agentic commerce. There was no prior art to borrow from on any of it. I partnered with Coinbase, World, Zora, Family, and MetaMask on what those things should actually be, and shaped how the protocol talked about privacy and decentralization in public, because a protocol nobody understands is a protocol nobody adopts.

I sat on the leadership team, ran design and design research, and gave strategic direction to the internal Convos Messenger product. Four and a half years designing things that didn't have names yet.

I arrived by acquisition, which is a strange way to start a job. Interchange got bought and I came with it.

Kraken is one of the largest and most trusted names in crypto. I recruited and scaled the team from 4 to nearly 30 across UX, visual design, research, and writing, covering consumer mobile, pro trading tools, futures, OTC, and Kraken Bank.

The work: a ground-up redesign of the Pro trading platform, new consumer product launches, and a design system that could hold together a product surface that got more complicated every quarter.

I managed 14 direct reports and ran their performance reviews. I partnered with the CEO and CPO on strategy and direction. I helped evaluate talent and shaped how new teams came in. Scaling a team is mostly deciding what you won't compromise on while everything else moves.

Institutional investors were managing crypto portfolios with tools that were not built for them.

So the platform had to be powerful enough for sophisticated traders and clear enough that nothing got lost in the complexity. Those two requirements fight each other on every single screen.

I led the entire design cycle from concept to production across mobile and desktop, and built the multi-platform design system that held it together. We started in Sketch and Abstract. I migrated us to Figma and established the engineering workflows that got design and development speaking the same language, which at the time was not a solved problem anywhere.

Kraken acquired us in July 2019, two years in. That's how I ended up there, and it's the clearest evidence I have that the work was doing something right.

The brief was one sentence and enormous. Build an app called All Day, on iOS and Android, for one of the most recognized sports brands on earth.

I led the digital design effort, reported directly to the Global Design Director for Future Digital Sports, and managed a team split between Portland and Herzogenaurach, Germany.

Two things had to be true at the same time. It had to be unmistakably adidas, and it had to feel like its own product instead of a brand guideline with buttons on it. So we built design systems grounded in the global brand standards with enough room left over for the product to have an identity.

Along the way I introduced an elevated design system and workflows the team didn't have yet: design version control, Lottie animations, advanced prototyping. All Day was later recognized by FastCompany as part of their Most Innovative Companies list.

Four people and a real problem: nurses had terrible tools.

Scheduling, communication, shift management. All of it broken, all of it used every day by people with no spare attention to give a bad interface.

I came in for the design and experience perspective and stayed to help build the company to 30+ people, raise $3.6M in venture capital, and make something nurses actually wanted to open.

1.5 million downloads. 4.9 stars in the App Store. A $25M acquisition by HealthStream in 2020. Those numbers belong to the whole team, and design and user research were a meaningful part of how we got them.

I sat on the executive leadership team and reported to the CEO and President. It's also where I learned the thing I've believed ever since: the right design, done early, compounds.

No margin for confusion. No second chances. No fixing it in an update.

SpaceX needed a touch interface for crew members aboard the Dragon v2 capsule, now called the Crew Dragon, and it needed to work in space. I partnered with Osage Orange and led the UI design effort on the CCtCap program alongside a team of UX leads and engineers.

I had never designed under constraints like that. Every decision had a consequence with a person attached to it.

Great design isn't aesthetics. It's clarity under pressure. That principle has shaped everything I've done since.

Brand identity. Pitch decks. Every screen on every platform. The creative for their first Times Square billboard.

I've been with Plug since the very beginning, which means I watched the EV marketplace go from a pitch to a platform. I helped interview their first employees and got to shape what kind of company it was going to be while there was barely a company to shape.

Plug is building the infrastructure for how people are going to buy and sell EVs. I've been there for all of it.

I designed their interface. I also worked on the shape of the boat.

Photon Marine came to me before they had a brand, a product interface, or a name for most of it. That's the engagement I want. Nothing is decided yet, and the early choices quietly determine what's still possible three years later.

So I developed the brand from the ground up, designed the user interfaces, and created the trade show materials, marketing assets, and pitch decks. The cowling and the boat design too, working closely with the development team so that what we designed was what actually got built.

High-power electric propulsion for commercial vessels. Cleaner, quieter, and considerably harder than it sounds.

The Nike Running App. Nike Training Club. The Just Do It campaigns. A campaign called Your Year. And SNKRS.

I worked on the launch of SNKRS, which happened during All-Star Weekend. I worked with the writing teams at AKQA and directly with Nike's global design team to develop prescriptive guidelines on art direction and visual design for the bespoke content threads: "This Day in Sneakers," "The Vault," and a number of others.

I'll say the quiet part. A photograph of a Nike shoe in a magazine is the reason I do any of this. Years later I was working on the app people use to buy the actual shoes.

A firehose of watched data coming through the platform every day, and users who needed to make sense of their own history.

Trakt needed a new brand and a redesigned product, and it had to hold up at real scale. People had to be able to view, collect, and track their favorite TV shows and movies efficiently, without drowning in the volume of what they'd already seen.

I designed their popular web app platform, the iOS and Android apps, and a podcast app that never shipped. Trakt grew to over three million users on the back of those designs and redesigns.

The unreleased one is still some of my favorite work. That happens more often than you'd think.

A redesign at that scale isn't a visual refresh. It's a structural problem.

Moneycrashers is one of the leading online resources for personal finance education, which means the platform has to do several hard things at once. Earn trust quickly. Make complex information feel approachable. Hold together across a content library that never stops growing.

I handled it end to end. Redesigned the platform, built a design system from scratch, developed the marketing design strategy and every piece of material that came with it, created internal tools, and produced the decks and one-pagers the team needed to operate.

Trust is a structural problem before it's a visual one. On a finance site it's the entire product.

Influencer kits. Animation easing curves. Multi-faceted dashboards. TV interfaces. Everything in between.

A lot of the work doesn't fit into a case study, and most of the best of it happened next to people who were better than me at something. It's been a humbling career, and I've been lucky in who was in the room.