An audit came back sure of itself, every number in it was correct, and its first recommendation was backwards. Three times I lost the reasoning behind a handoff, and none of them were caused by AI.

I’ve fallen into months-long traps over kerning and button states. The tell was swapping between ideas. The details still matter. Everything should be touched at least once.

I built something I still think is great, and it isn’t doing what I built it to do. I assumed changing the format would change the perception. Sometimes it’s flipped.

A quote I’ve reached for as long as I can remember, read next to the design spec. What passes, what lasts, and why my work is life written down that rhymes with design.

An AI flags the line before I send it, and I feel relief, then the part that stings. Almost twenty years of messages went out with nobody flagging anything. On the mindfulness pause that was already doing that job, and the rule I run so a second reader doesn’t quietly become a replacement.

Two years ago I guessed where design was going. Every guess has been answered.

A design-engineering stance: limitations are sequencing problems, not blockers.

A bad workman blames his tools—but sometimes the tool is the ceiling. On how Figma labels designers as picture-makers, why every visual builder trades one lock-in for another, and the build workflow that removes the handoff so the thing you design is the thing that ships.

A project falling apart, fifty-odd UI defects and no source of truth, and what staying in it taught me: friction only sharpens you when there’s something steady to work against.

AI makes design fast. Dangerously fast. On why code friction is the discipline the process needs, and how to build constraints that let you run.

How Genie went from personal experiment to organizational platform, and what building it changed about how I work, what I’m capable of, and how others engage with me.

On the difference between the discomfort that makes you better and the kind that follows you home — and how to tell which one you’re feeding.

Finding joy in enterprise design when the craft has moved from pixels to systems, and why the human part of the work matters more as tools get better.

On showing up prepared without knowing the right answer, learning to sit with that discomfort, and being kind enough to yourself to build the support before you need it.

What designing for agentic systems looks like (mapping real workflows, defining agent behavior, setting guardrails), and why the skills designers already have are the ones that matter most.

How pressure, curiosity, and transferable skills created a career path no one handed me. On finding your niche, navigating identity shifts, and building relevance by staying grounded in what’s true about how you work.

Speculation on where design is heading, read as tensions rather than destinations: siloed to integrated, static to dynamic, proprietary to open-source.

The complementary role of human and machine intelligence. Automation is acceleration, not intelligence. The future of quality is machines for detection, humans for discernment.

When quality is built into the baseline from the start, QA shifts from discovery to confirmation, and the best QA process is the one that doesn’t have to happen.

A living collection of wisdom from opinionated mentors, teachers, and personal design observations. From foundational principles to leadership lessons, this is a journal of continuous learning in design, code, and craft.

On the principles beneath front-end tools: headless complexity, tech debt, and why interoperability should be the core of your design practice.

Why a shared design language is the most resilient investment teams can make while tools, roles, and workflows keep changing.

As agentic AI raises customer expectations for responsive, intelligent service, the gap between what companies promise and what they reliably deliver becomes their actual brand identity.

Designing agentic systems forces you to rethink how delivery work gets done: shifting requirements, scattered context, rising risk, and teams stretched thin. How we built Genie, an agentic orchestration layer that consolidates context, generates requirements, surfaces risks, and automates workflows, and the three mental model problems we solved in designing for agentic AI.

How I built a unified token architecture, an AI-guarded lint pipeline, and a one-command dev loop that kept Figma, code, and AI tooling in sync across four brands, two themes, and two modalities, for a multi-display, multi-brand product platform.

A strategic planning tool for a Fortune 100 company — making complex organizational data across business units, budgets, and initiatives navigable without flattening it.

OnLogic’s customers are IT professionals configuring industrial PCs with specific hardware requirements — where a wrong choice has real consequences. Migrated from a legacy platform to composable commerce, with a configuration flow built around real dependencies.

A convenience-store loyalty program that had to reach the fuel pump, not just the phone. Rebuilt on React Native and a composable content stack, so the team ran its own promotions, search, and rewards, and customers prepaid gas and redeemed points at the pump, without a third party in the loop.

When a brand launches a new identity, the website needs to reflect it without breaking what already works. Redesigned Softchoice’s website within their existing CMS structure, enhancing modules, introducing motion design, and working closely with development on fidelity.

A delivery team learning to work with AI, through an agent built in Slack before most of the tools for it existed. No one uses it now, but they all use parts of it.

UI experiments, design process, and work-in-progress from across projects.

Six short sessions for when you are good at what you do and it has stopped feeling like enough. Each time, you arrive somewhere quiet, notice one true thing about where you actually are, and write down one line. The six lines are the page, and every line on it is yours.

A script that fills the enclosed counter spaces inside letterforms (the holes in o, e, a, g) with any colour or gradient. Generative, font-agnostic, and built on real DOM text so it stays accessible.

A lightweight design guard that scans staged files for hardcoded lengths (px/rem/%/etc.) and colors, nudging code toward design tokens.

A safe script that converts straight quotes to smart quotes in rendered content without touching code, bindings, or attribute delimiters.