About

Personal Background

I'm a self-taught visual designer, interaction designer, and frontend web developer. I really enjoy playing video games, taking photos, and tinkering with technology. You can sometimes find me posting about random stuff on Mastodon or Bluesky.

My Canadian-American wife Heather, who I love dearly, also happens to be a talented designer and illustrator. My dad Artie, who lives in Stilwell, OK, has worked in publishing, underground comix, animation, web design, hosting, and lots of other stuff. My best brother Tim is a successful video game developer and excellent human in SoCal — he's worked on lots of games you've heard of, and others you should definitely "chunk" out if you haven't.

I'm originally from Colorado Springs, CO. In 2005, I moved to Silicon Valley and have been here ever since — more info about that below!

Professional Background

If you want to dive deep, please check out my 2022 portfolio website. It's much more impressive than this one.

My professional career started in the early 2000s at CityStar, where I was a designer on lots of websites for local businesses in Colorado. I also started learning JavaScript in 2003, with a desktop Widget engine called Konfabulator, to help automate grunt work in the office.

During this time, I was also designing and coding lots of Widgets to decorate my desktop. This was a pretty novel concept at the time, to be able to skin any information as a Widget with beautiful alpha transparency and share it with other users on the Konfabulator forums and Widget Gallery. I enjoyed it a lot!

Eventually, Arlo Rose – the designer of Konfabulator – took notice of the Widgets I'd created. He asked me to help out with administrative tasks on the Widget Gallery, as well as updating the Konfabulator website and moderating the forums. When Yahoo! bought Konfabulator in 2005, he brought me on the team in California. At Yahoo!, I designed and built lots of Widgets, designed and maintained the Widget Gallery, moderated the forums, designed and built pages on the website, and did some initial design work on the smart TV project. You can learn more about my time at Yahoo! on my professional portfolio.

I joined Intuit in early 2008 as a designer on a product called Customer Manager Online. It was a CRM tool which integrated with QuickBooks. After that, I joined the Grow Your Business team, working on products such as SiteBuilder, Grow Guide, and an email marketing tool.

I moved to the small business marketing team at Intuit in 2011, where I was responsible for designing the main intuit.com homepage, global navigation, and Intuit's first mobile site. I worked on that team for 6 years, where I designed marketing pages and signup flows, and created production-quality prototypes. I also worked closely with the engineering teams to deliver fast page performance.

In 2016 I switched roles, working under a brand-new Design Technology team in the Small Business/Self-Employed Group at Intuit. As a design technologist, I delivered many high-fidelity prototypes alongside production-quality code across both product and marketing.

In late 2022, I joined Amazon's Prime Video team as a design technologist, and was promoted to senior a year later.

If you'd like to learn a whole lot more about me and my day jobs, take a look at my professional portfolio.