My Journey

I've loved drawing since I was a kid — cartoons mostly, inked and colored with markers. That led to painting when I started college, which is still my primary medium. An MFA from the University of Chicago followed, and for a while I taught art and design as an adjunct instructor. The visual instinct I bring to every project — the sense of space, weight, and movement — comes from there. When I found the web in the 90s, I already knew what I liked looking at. Learning to make things move on a screen felt like a natural extension of that.

In the early 2000s I was working as a graphic designer at an advertising agency, doing brand work, print layouts, and eventually websites. The web was still relatively new. I was excited to learn how to build web experiences and web applications. I taught myself PHP and MySQL, connected Dreamweaver templates to databases, and started building CMSes so clients could manage their own content. Somewhere in there I got deep into Flash and spent hours learning to add animations and dynamic interactions.

One of those Flash projects was a 3D animated carousel of trucks built by a company that customized and manufactured them for use in the oil field — and that's probably where I fell in love with using code as a design medium. The idea that mathematics and logic were viable creative tools was transformative. Motion became something I kept returning to: later in JavaScript, then with ChartJS data visualizations, and eventually a full browser-based video editor built from scratch.

A few years in, I joined TexasNIC to work on Texas.gov — large-scale government software with thousands of forms, regulatory workflows, and licensing systems. I introduced React and AngularJS to the team and spent a lot of time thinking about how to make complex processes feel navigable to people who didn't want to be using them in the first place. That's the UI/UX problem I find most interesting: compelling experiences.

At Adobe (via a Magento acquisition) I worked on the overlap between e-commerce infrastructure and content management, figuring out how deployment pipelines could live inside AEM in a way teams could actually follow. Then at OneDay I got to build closer to the surface: animated data dashboards, a peer-to-peer chat over WebRTC, and a video editor running entirely in the browser. That last one touched every layer of the stack and demanded as much design thinking as engineering.

These days I'm drawn to the places where AI, design, and interactive media meet. I still draw. I still notice when something is slightly off-kerned or when an animation eases wrong. Those instincts don't turn off when I'm writing code — if anything, they're the part that tells me when something is done.