Designer working at the system layer.

I came to product design without planning to. My degree is in mechanical engineering, and my first job out of college was at a small startup agency working on both physical and digital products. That's where I discovered UX as a discipline, mostly by doing the work before I had a word for it.

I spent seven years at that agency, working across scales from D2C startups to enterprise programs. I joined Merkle in 2021, made Lead in 2023. The work I'm proudest of — Arrow Electronics, U.S. Bank Business Banking, and Herbalife — sits in the last few years.

The work I'm drawn to is structural. Most consumer design conventions are about reducing cognitive load for people who don't yet know what they want. The products I tend to end up on are the opposite — built for people who know exactly what they want and need to verify it, plan against it, or negotiate around it.

The transactional spine at Arrow Electronics — Cart, Quote, Checkout — is a single data model rendered three ways for the same buyer, not three separate flows duct-taped together. The IA pattern I designed for U.S. Bank's Business Banking propagated across all five top-level segments of usbank.com because the architectural moves were sound at any scale. The Herbalife distributor platform supports a Day-1 prospect and a 21-year veteran on the same underlying product without either being patronized or overwhelmed. All three of those are design work, but the unit of design was the system, not the screen.

I'm building toward design engineering now — the ability to take an idea from sketch to live product without a separate engineering team for every iteration. I'm rebuilding this portfolio in code, working in the terminal with Claude Code directly — no wrappers, no IDE integrations — because the friction is the point. It's the same systems thinking that pulled me into product design in the first place, just at a deeper layer.