My first ever live vlog on personal portfolio
Building this site in the open — what I planned, what I threw away, and the parts that only made sense once they were on a screen.
Blog
Designing for density without losing the plot
Finance products earn their complexity. The trick is deciding what a user has to read before they can act, and what can wait.
Systems before screens
Why I start with tokens and spacing rules rather than the hero shot, and how that changes what handoff even means.
Where AI actually helps in the research loop
Synthesis, clustering and the unglamorous middle of the process — and the places it still gets in the way.
Craft
Prototypes that earn their keep
A prototype should answer one question. Most answer none, and take a week doing it.
Product
The brief is the work
Half of every project I have shipped was decided before a single frame existed, in the argument about what we were solving.
Design System
Naming things in a design system
A token called brand-primary-2 tells you nothing at three in the morning. Names are the interface to the system.
Product
What users say versus what they do
Interviews tell you the story people want to be true. Analytics tell you the one that is. You need both, in that order.
Craft
Motion with a job to do
Every transition should explain where something came from. If it cannot, it is decoration with a performance cost.
AI in Design
Prompting is a design skill now
Writing a good prompt is writing a good brief. The people who were already precise about intent had a head start.
Other Blogs
Published weekly, whether or not the week was interesting.
Rebuilt the case-study template around a single 1440 canvas
Notes on picking a type scale you can actually hold in your head
A short list of the Figma habits that survived contact with engineering
Why I stopped drawing every state and started writing them down
Reading the analytics before opening the design file
Two weeks with a component library I did not build
The handoff doc nobody read, and what replaced it