Notes from the work.
Brand systems, interface craft, regulated commerce, and the unglamorous parts of a project that never make it into a case study.
Two Lanes: Leading Creative Inside an Agency and Running My Own Studio
I work in two modes. As Lead Creative Director at Growth Factor Consulting, I lead creative inside a larger agency, collaborating across…
✦ Pinned
Regulated Industries Deserve Sophisticated Design
There’s a lazy assumption baked into a lot of design for regulated industries: that because the category is serious, careful, and rule-bound,…
The Rescue Nobody Sees: Cleaning Up 131,000 Database Rows Without Taking the Store Down
Not every piece of creative work looks creative. Some of it looks like a database table with a quarter of a million…
Building Eldritch Exchange: Why a Studio Is a Point of View, Not a Service List
Plenty of designers describe what they do with a list of services. UX, branding, web design, illustration, front-end. I can produce that…
RegulatedBadass but Compliant: Designing Brand Language for a Firearms-Adjacent Platform
You can build a bold brand or you can build a compliant one. A lot of people treat those as opposite ends…
Heritage as the Spine, Not the Wallpaper: Modernizing a Legacy Brand
Every legacy brand hits the same tension when it decides to modernize. Lean too hard into the heritage and you look like…
BrandEvery Drop Hits Once, Then It’s Gone: Building ManCave’s Drop-Based Brand
Most engagement problems get solved with more. More posts, more promos, more reminders to buy. I’ve come to believe that’s usually backwards.…
Making Precision Tangible: An Interactive Homepage for a Precision Brand
Some products sell themselves the second you hold them. Pick up a well-made riflescope and you understand it immediately: the weight, the…
BrandOne Brand, Five Voices: The Voice System Behind ManCave
Most brands think they have a voice problem. Usually what they actually have is a repetition problem. They land on one tone,…
The Invisible Craft: Keeping a Premium Brand Premium After Launch
A premium digital experience isn’t a thing you finish. It’s a standard you maintain. That idea sits at the center of how…
SystemsDesigning an E-Commerce Store as One System: The XF Nutrition Build
When I design an online store, I’m not really designing pages. I’m designing a system that happens to show up as pages.…
Compliance as a Design Input, Not a Creativity Killer
Say the word compliance in a room full of creatives and watch the energy drop. It’s treated as the place where good…
ConversionSell the Goal, Not the SKU: Designing XF Nutrition’s Goals-Based Discovery
Walk a first-time buyer into a supplement catalog and watch what happens. Rows of tubs, unfamiliar names, overlapping claims, and a quiet,…
Custom Visuals vs Stock: How to Know When Bespoke Is Worth It
Stock imagery is one of the great time-savers in design, and also one of the quietest ways a brand undercuts itself. I’ve…
Design Systems Let a Business Grow Without Reinventing Every Page
Here’s a pattern I’ve watched play out more times than I can count. A brand launches looking sharp. Six months later the…
Designing Trust: Why Structure Earns It and Adjectives Don’t
Every brand wants to be trusted, and most of them try to get there by saying so. Trusted. Secure. Reliable. Industry-leading. Those…
How I Use ChatGPT as a Creative Thought Partner, Not a Decision-Maker
I use AI in my creative process every day, and I’m not shy about it. What I want to be precise about…
Mobile Isn’t a Shrink-Down: Designing the Phone Experience on Purpose
There’s a version of responsive design that treats the phone as an afterthought. Design the desktop site, then squeeze it down until…
My Creative Process: Simplify Before You Decorate
People sometimes assume a creative director’s process starts with a burst of visual inspiration, a moodboard, a color palette, a big aesthetic…
Navigation Is Invisible When It’s Right: Lessons from Deep Catalogs
Nobody ever emails a company to praise its navigation. When a menu works, it disappears, and visitors move through a site so…
Knowing When to Preserve an Approved Design and When to Rebuild Around It
One of the least-discussed skills in creative direction is knowing when to leave a design alone and when to tear into the…
Familiar or Fatiguing? The Line Between Useful Repetition and Visual Monotony
Repetition is one of the most powerful tools in design and one of the easiest to misuse. Repeat the right things and…
Simplification Is Strategic Work, Not the Absence of Work
There’s a persistent misconception that simplifying a design is the easy part. Adding is the real work, the thinking goes, and taking…
When a Small Design Change Reveals a Much Bigger Problem
Some of the most important work I’ve done started as a tiny request. Move this. Remove that. Tweak this one section. And…
Tactical Design Doesn’t Mean Camouflage
There’s a look that a lot of people reach for the second they hear “firearms brand” or “tactical.” Camo texture in the…
The Unglamorous Work: Why I Care About the Details Nobody Notices
If you only saw the portfolio version of my work, you’d think design is all hero images and bold brand systems. A…
Visual Hierarchy Is a Conversion Tool, Not a Styling Choice
Ask most people what makes a page convert and they’ll point at the obvious levers: the headline, the offer, the button color,…
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