About
Thirty years of design work, mostly on the web. The current chapter is figuring out what design practice becomes when AI does the making.
In the spring of 1996 I was an Oklahoma State undergrad reading Teach Yourself HTML in 24 Hours instead of going to class. I put the pages I made on my university Unix account, and campus IT found them during an account-usage audit — which ultimately turned into a demo request from the Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education. Their presentation room had no internet, so I put a 3.5" floppy into a computer and showed them this new thing called the World Wide Web.
My grades suffered. My career did not.
Most of the first fifteen years ran through marketing and advertising — local car ads at the bottom, national brands by the end. My first gig had me as animator, video editor, and web guy. My first full-time web job was for an online pharmacy, one of the first sites that let patients manage prescriptions and deliveries online. The company was acquired in 2001 and I was laid off because the new owners decided the internet was a fad for the sixty-five-and-over demographic. Another decade at studios and agencies, building whatever digital meant that year.
Enterprise healthcare came next. Design systems at Cerner, then design leadership through Oracle's acquisition. Oracle Health laid me off in the infamous 5 a.m. 30,000-person email.
I've been teaching myself new tools ever since that HTML book. AI is the latest — goofy image generation at first, now Domain Foundation, which is about getting a design organization's real expertise into a form AI can actually use.
The Cocktail Napkin has been my blog and podcast since the mid-2000s, back when I was a D-list internet celebrity. This is the current form.
Work with me
Available for design system engagements, UX strategy consulting, and senior design leadership roles. Working with teams anywhere.