Technical

The first thing I do with any problem is strip it down. Remove the noise, collapse the ambiguity, and get to the actual friction. What’s really broken here, and what does it look like when it’s fixed? Once I can see the outcome clearly, I work backwards — figuring out the minimum viable path between here and there, and where the real obstacles are.

That outcomes-first orientation shapes everything. But it also has a known failure mode: a solution that solves the problem perfectly and gets used by nobody. A tool is only as effective as it’s actually used, and adoption doesn’t happen automatically just because something works.
So before I build anything, I try to understand who’s going to use it and what problems they have. If I need someone to adopt a system to solve my problem, I have to solve at least one of theirs in the process. The best systems I’ve built are ones where the person using it gets something real out of the interaction — not just a new process they’re supposed to follow, but something that genuinely makes their job easier. That’s where adoption comes from, and it’s why I treat ease of use and feel as requirements, not polish.

The other thing I won’t skip is forward pressure. A solution that doesn’t account for what happens when it scales, when something breaks, or when the person who built it isn’t around anymore isn’t really a solution — it’s the next problem. Every system I ship is designed to be maintained, extended, and handed off. An HR document pipeline that’s been running without intervention. A draft management platform holding up across three consecutive seasons. A tournament coordination system deployed in front of 260 people with zero failures. They work not because I got lucky, but because I thought about what it would take for them to keep working before I wrote a line of code.

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.