I think about design and efficiency. I've been doing this so long I think about balancing business goals with user needs. Sometimes I think about metrics, adoption and customer loyalty. Most of the time I think too long about typefaces and illustration. It's all made me who I am and why I'm hard to classify as just one type of designer.

Cross-functional collaboration is fun for me. My ethos is that the user experience IS the brand. I was on the founding team of Yelp many years ago as their first (and only) designer. Since then I've lived in tradeoff land designing products at a handful of early-stage startups that didn't succeed. I went back to art school for a few years to sharpen my illustration skills and even spend some time writing about design.

Currently I'm Senior Lead Designer at the climate and reforestation startup Terraformation, where our goal is to plant a trillion trees to help combat the climate crisis. I split my time between two product managers — strategizing new features, connecting disparate user experiences, sweating UI details, maintaining our design system, aligning ideas with stakeholders, and collaborating closely with our small development team. I've recently integrated Claude Code into my workflow and have been experimenting with what ideation and handoffs look like in an AI-assisted process. I guess this old dog can still learn some new tricks.