The model of you stays.
Here's a wacky idea: knowledge workers should get to license what's in their heads to their employers the way we license Photoshop.
The cocktail napkin is older than design.
It’s where the idea is allowed to be wrong — before the deck, the Figma file, the Jira ticket.
Mine used to be a Moleskine. Then a whiteboard. Lately it’s been a Claude chat session open in Plan Mode.
- 01
Designs should be simple.
Interactions within design should be ridiculously simple. A decade of design systems taught me that complexity is almost always a sign that someone upstream didn’t make a decision.
- 02
Figma is the right place to start.
It’s almost never the long-term source of truth. The moment you’re building a real design system, the npm package starts pulling ahead — and knowing when to go back to Figma to reconcile, versus when to keep building forward, is the judgment most teams never develop.
- 03
AI in design is a knowledge problem before it’s a prompt problem.
Most teams skip straight to prompting, then wonder why the output sounds like no one who works there.
- 04
The napkin sketch is the spec.
Figma is a translation, code is a translation, and the meeting where someone asks “but what did you mean by this?” is what happens when the intent didn’t survive the trip.
- 05
Simple, yet strong.
Knots and components work the same way — they hold until the requirements change, and then you see what you actually built.
“The clove hitch is an incredibly simple knot. Once under tension, it holds until the rope breaks.”
Methodology
See all work → Domain Foundation
Encoding institutional design expertise as layered, machine-readable knowledge an AI can reason with. Because default models produce default output.
Read the case study → Case studyMoonbird
A year building a RAG pipeline — vector database, MCP server, Figma Make integration — to generate design-system-aligned UI inside Oracle Health. The research that became Domain Foundation.
Read the case study → Case studyTerra Design System
Open-source React component library at Cerner. 80+ components, 200+ icons, WCAG 2.1 AA, Apache 2.0. UX designer working directly in the React codebase alongside engineering.
Read the case study →A journal of unbridled creativity
The Workshop.
My neurodivergent brain isn’t happy unless I have a handful of creative projects going simultaneously. Right now it’s a personal kiosk and a pocket-sized radio scanner.