Approach
Approach
Creative
My starting point is always the brand’s world, not just its style guide. What does this brand actually feel like? What would it say? What would it never do? What questions does it answer? Once I understand that, the work is about finding every format that world can live in — including the ones nobody thought to put in the brief.
A lot of what I do involves brands that have a strong point of view. That means the design problem is usually less about making something look good and more about making it feel unmistakably right. A menu, a poster, a piece of merchandise, a holiday activation — they should all feel like they came from the same place, even if they look completely different from each other. While running both Last Rites and Horsefeather simultaneously, that discipline got tested across two brands with nothing aesthetically in common, and it definitely made it one of my best skills.
Photography is part of how I work, not something I hand off. Shooting the work means I can control the full visual output from concept through to final asset, and it means the photos actually fit the brand instead of feeling borrowed from somewhere else.
I use AI tools (Midjourney, Claude) as part of the creative process — for ideation, iteration, and moving faster — but the thinking and the taste have to come first. A prompt is only as good as the person directing it.
Technical
I build things that solve a specific problem and keep working after I’m done with them. That means thinking about how a system will be maintained, who will use it, and what happens when something breaks at 11pm on a Saturday.
Most of what I’ve built started the same way: I noticed something that wasn’t working, figured out what it would take to fix it, and built it. An HR document pipeline that reduced a 12-step manual process to 4 steps. A full-stack draft management platform for a sports league, built with Cursor and Claude Code, that’s been running in production across three seasons with zero failures. Automation workflows that replaced manual work people had stopped noticing was painful.
I work with no-code and low-code tools for operational automation, and I’m comfortable going further with AI-assisted development when the problem calls for it. The goal is always the same: a system that does what it’s supposed to do, that the right people actually want to use, and that doesn’t need me to babysit it.