Hi, I'm
Designer of websites and brand marks. Developer of the same. Husband of one, father of four, resident of the Texas Hill Country.
A short résumé — abridged for the sake of the reader.
Started the usual way — online marketing, conversion copy, landing pages built in the early days of the mobile web. Learned, in order: that beautiful things that don't convert aren't serving anyone, and that things that convert but aren't beautiful rarely last.
The work since has been a slow walk away from one of those ideas and toward the other. Design “that performs” is still the working phrase, but the second half of that sentence — beauty matters — is the part I keep trying to earn.
Design and development in the same pair of hands. It means the code doesn't lag behind the intent. It means when a layout wants to breathe, it breathes. It means the team I hand it to doesn't have to reverse-engineer anything.
Online marketing role. Learned conversion before composition.
Realized naming, mark, and voice all belong to the same sentence.
Wife, kids, and a small studio of one. Serving clients nationwide from a quiet place.
The folio as it stands today. Detail by detail.
“I
enjoy
designing
inside
the
boundaries
of
what
a
client
likes.
It's
'art'
too —
making
the
complex
simple,
keeping
the
simple,
well,
simple.”
The best work I've done begins with asking the right question before offering the right answer. Each company's uniqueness is the thing that makes anything else effective, and no two briefs are close.
So there's an intake that's a little longer than you'd expect, a little nosier. Favorite movies and worst music genres and the real story of how the business came to be. That's where the brief is.
The challenge — my favorite challenge — is identifying and creating something that will help you prosper and excel. Everything else is in service of that sentence.
Tools change. The thinking doesn't. Here's what's in rotation this year.
Twenty years married this summer. Four children, an assortment of ages, all noisier than the last. A small house on a hill in the Texas Hill Country that somehow ends up on a Christmas card every year.
The studio is one of the bedrooms. The clients are all over the map. The work, improbably, gets better each year. I take that as a good sign.
I'd love to hear from you. Questions and comical first-hand stories are heartily welcomed.