I’m a designer in Ontario, Canada. I’ve written HTML & CSS for 20 years. I express my ideas best through pixels and words. The quote “design is how it works” (credit: Jobs) speaks to me.
I’ve always loved inventing for the web. It’s a magical place where you can build products quickly to solve real problems and distribute them to millions of people around the world. Not to mention, writing good HTML, CSS & English and hitting publish feels so damn good.
In addition to the act of designing, I enjoy distilling what customers actually need from what they say, saying no to a lot of stuff, editing for brevity, building technical knowhow of software engineering, typography, old-school blogging, learning from history, and work-life balance.
I’m a values-driven person. What makes me me are honesty, kindness, listening and doing over talking, high dependability, vast curiosity, good imagination, attention to detail and an ability to maintain calm & composure in a crisis. Helping good people thrive brings me joy.
My whole is greater than the sum of my parts.
I come in peace and don’t have it out for anyone, but dishonesty, shitty customer experiences and status quos upholding mediocrity light a fire under me — I’m not afraid to pick a fight.
Most of my career has been spent building & shipping consumer products, mostly as a manager of one. I founded two web startups. Both eventually failed. This experience enabled me to relearn that stayups > startups.
In 2023, I left the founder life and became a hands-on designer, working fractionally with multiple clients.
My first client was a Y Combinator company building an online death insurance product for elective surgeries — I redesigned their website from scratch. In another project, I designed the consumer app and the charger management dashboard for a 30-year old power company building their first EV charging network. I also worked with a consumer brand to build a digital version of their language learning flash cards.
Now, I’m looking for my next move that would give me purpose in work & financial stability for 5-10 years.
I signed up for Backpack in 2005 and Basecamp in 2006. I was an avid reader of the svn blog. The outflow of 37signals through its writing, podcasts and walking the talk has had a profound impact on how I think. I’ve also applied Shape Up to real projects. I admire the company’s no-BS approach to building a long-term, sustainable and profitable product business that enjoys optionality.
Admiration doesn’t equate to fanboyism. I seek the truth. Truth about products, customer needs and philosophies. I won’t hesitate to push back and challenge when I need to.
You build opinionated software? Well, I’m an opinionated designer.
Irrespective of what 37signals thinks about my candidacy for this job, three things are true for me. One, I’d pick Shape Up over any product development process. Two, as a designer, I’d pick writing HTML & CSS over any drag-and-drop tool (including Figma—I’ve had to learn this the hard way). Three, I’d take a few weeks of disciplined shipping, even for a tiny feature, over months of ‘research and development’ and meetings, any day.
Dieter Rams & his principles. There’s something to learn from each product he has designed for Braun & Vitsoe since the 1950s.
The work of Steve Jobs, Jony Ive, Massimo Vignelli, McKnight Kauffer, Frog Design, IDEO, Near Future Laboratory.
Because not everything needs to be.
I love CSS grids as much as the next person, but using a tool just because it’s trendy isn’t a good reason. It should serve an actual purpose.
In this case, I wanted a continuous newspaper-like flow of text that renders predictably and prints cleanly to PDF. Multi-column layout has been part of CSS for nearly 20 years—and it’s exactly the right tool for the job.
I know it’s a crazy job market out there and you’re a high-profile company with a massive audience. I’m sure you’ll get a ton of great candidates.
But if you’ve made it till here and are interested in learning more, let’s chat.