I fancied myself a computer man.
AI is the Internet in a box. Spent last night at Kansas City AI Club, in a room full of people comparing notes on the blinking red light.
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.
Principles of Design.
- 01
Designs should be simple.
Not minimal for its own sake — simple because complexity is almost always a sign that someone upstream didn’t make a decision. A decade of design systems only made me more certain of it.
- 02
Interactions should be ridiculously simple.
The visual layer is the easy part to keep clean. The interaction layer is where simplicity actually gets tested — every extra step is one the user has to forgive you for.
- 03
The experience should explain itself.
Simple to look at and simple to use should add up to something a person understands without a tour. If it needs an onboarding flow to make sense, the design hasn’t finished its job.
- 04
Sophistication is the product making the smart choice for you.
It always meant smart defaults and automating the work the user shouldn’t have to think about. AI just raised the ceiling — the system can anticipate now, not only default. Where it’s relevant, not everywhere.
- 05
Beauty serves the goal, not the other way around.
Work should be pleasing to look at — I’d never argue otherwise. But when aesthetics and the business outcome disagree, the outcome wins. A gorgeous screen that doesn’t move the number is a portfolio piece, not a product.
“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.