A lot of companies start seeking out help for a project they're doing — rebranding their business, making a new website, creating some custom internal tools — and think they want someone who's a career designer.
Someone who'll just make their stuff look good, who spends all day on Dribbble, someone who drools over icon sets and makes fonts in their spare time.
But the truth is, most businesses need someone who can design for their business goals — not their preferences.
That means asking the tough questions about how this design might help your bottom line, and whether that color blue you like is going to resonate with your customers instead of your favorite niece.
Ultimately, you don't need a pixel pusher. You need a designer who can code like an engineer, write like a copywriter, and think like a business owner.
I've been approached by and worked with companies like Disney, Spotify, Google, Adobe, NBCUniversal, The Wall Street Journal, General Assembly, Heroku, Mozilla, Stripe, Readmill, Trunk Club, Metalab, PRX, Librato, Ginkgo Bioworks, Openstudy, Citizen, TypeThursday and more.
If you'd like to check out a few select projects from the last 15+ years of coding, design, and business, here's a few highlights:
The first open-source font foundry, started by your truly, nearly 13 years ago. With a variety of partners over the years, I've consistently led all the design, writing, newsletter, growth, and business.
Operating as a one-man shop inside the hot but controversial new startup, I played the roles of product manager, designer, and developer — working closely with the team who needed specialized tools to run the entire consumer-facing app. We iterated, revamped, and designed new experiences entirely from scratch, proving a huge increase in efficiency, accuracy, and morale.
An objective and empirical evaluation that detects the distinct eye movement pattern found in persons with ADHD. The ADHD Test ends with a personalized report if you have a low, moderate, or high chance of ADHD. From just 90 seconds of reading.
For the 2020 SuperBowl, Frito Lay & Cheetos had a big new product to launch. Working with the fine folks over at Wildebeest, we crafted a unique app to snap a photo of your hands and use machine learning to tell whether you had Cheetos on them.
Branding, marketing, and functional mini-site to demonstrate a unique new open-source font for Google fonts — one designed to adjust specifically to reader's needs, in order to help reading comprehension.
Designing & developing a mysterious and animated marketing site with a custom calendar & ticket purchasing integration for on the most well-known magic shows in New York City.
A custom suite of unique internal tools for the volunteers & employees working behind the scenes for TypeThursday, a global network of monthly design meetups in cities around the world.
After successfully teaching a few rounds of GA's flagship web development course, I was tasked with redesigning the next version of what students needed to learn entirely from the ground up. I worked with teachers across the globe to uncover the most crucial topics to include, worked with stakeholders at the C-level to incorporate their future agendas, and ultimately ended up writing an entire handbook teaching future teachers how to teach the newest web tech to students.
