About

I started my career in design during the early days of Web 2.0, before product design had a name or formal education programs. You just figured it out. I worked on BlackPlanet and AOL, prescient social platforms that predated MySpace and Facebook, then spent time at fast-paced agencies: art direction for fashion and beauty clients and interactive advertising at TBWA\Chiat\Day, before landing at Hearst Magazines.

At Hearst I built design systems at a scale I didn't anticipate when I joined. What started as taking 80 templates down to 3 became a single platform, CMS, and component library running 85 magazine sites across 60+ brands worldwide. I was the designer and the front-end developer: the same person who translated the product requirements into designs also committed the SCSS to the codebase. No handoff, because there was nobody else to hand off to.

That experience convinced me that design and code are the same discipline, not adjacent ones. The decisions you make in a design file have to survive contact with a browser, a real device, a real user, and a real publishing deadline. The fastest way to make sure they do is to be the person who writes the CSS.

These days I build with AI in the loop: coding agents doing real work in my repos, local models running in my homelab, and routing between them and frontier APIs based on cost and capability. The workflow has a name — Gate and Wave: a frontier model takes the Gate, the architecture pass; cheap models fan out on the Wave, the mechanical work; I supervise the agents like a design team. The writing section covers that work in detail.

I'm based in New York.