Design Rationale · 22 Essays

Decision Book

Long case studies often hide the "why." My decision book keeps it clear: concise rationale and real design decisions, shaped by 7+ years on a leading project management app.

Essays
22 articles,
6 categories
Experience
7+ years,
productivity
Focus
The why,
not the what
Measuring What a Design System Actually Does
Data Analysis
Measuring What a Design System Actually Does

How to move from "it feels faster" to adoption rates, handoff times, and satisfaction scores — metrics any design team can track.

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Making Churn Visible
Data Analysis
Making Churn Visible

Designing an executive churn dashboard — a four-layer narrative that moves leadership from problem to decision.

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When Ideas Come Alive with the Touch of AI
Build with AI
When Ideas Come Alive with the Touch of AI

A short note on how integrating AI into the design process changed not just the output — but the way the decision itself was made.

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Watch it Flex
UI Design
Watch it Flex

On responsive layout decisions, fluid tokens, and the quiet choreography that makes an interface feel native at every width.

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Zoom Notes
Product Design
Zoom Notes, Before Zoom Notes

A small pattern, hiding in plain sight for years — and what it taught me about paying attention to the things users already do.

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Select Under Construction
Design System
Select Under Construction

Rebuilding the humble select from first principles — states, edge cases, and the compromises you only see once you ship it.

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From Image to Insight
Build with AI
From Image to Insight

Building CaptionCraft AI in two minutes — a small helper that turns any uploaded image into a clean, objective alt text.

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Degrading with Dignity
Product Design
Degrading with Dignity

Designing a Calendar for both web and mobile — what graceful degradation looks like when the screen shrinks but the intent shouldn't.

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Read Between the Lines
Design System
Read Between the Lines

Building a typographic system from the ground up — relative units, tokens, scale, and the quiet levers of weight and color that guide the reader's eye.

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Hue Knew? Create Systematic Color Palettes
Design System
Hue Knew? Create Systematic Color Palettes

Building a palette that survives dark mode, brand drift, and three product teams — without collapsing into a pile of hex codes.

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A-Musing Photo Album
Build with AI
A-Musing Photo Album

A small visual study — the kind of side piece that exists mostly to remind you why the craft matters in the first place.

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Naming a Design System with Care
Design System
Naming a Design System with Care

A name is the first structural decision. What happens when you treat it as rigorously as the components themselves.

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Earn the Next Layer
Product Design
Earn the Next Layer

Designing the User Card — a study in progressive enhancement, where each new layer has to justify its place before the interface earns it.

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A Redesign Under the Hood
Product Design
A Redesign Under the Hood

A solo side project on ActiveCollab's Projects page — how smaller type, lighter icons, and tighter chrome gave the content room to breathe.

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Documenting the Design Patterns
Design System
Documenting the Design Patterns

What to write, what to skip, and why docs are a product surface of their own — read far more often than any dashboard.

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Diamonds Are Forever
UX Research
Diamonds Are Forever

On the double diamond — what it quietly gets right, what teams routinely skip, and how to keep the discovery half honest.

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Evaluating New Product Feature Success
Product Design
Evaluating New Product Feature Success

A small framework for asking, a month after launch, whether the thing you shipped actually moved the needle you chose.

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Vibe Check on Gigs
Build with AI
Vibe Check on Gigs

Prototyping a local gig feed with Firebase Studio — and what Facebook's locked-down data taught me about the limits of AI-assisted building.

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Crafting the Dashboard Blueprint
UI Design
Crafting the Dashboard Blueprint

Starting from the question — not the chart. How hierarchy, grouping, and restraint decide whether a dashboard is useful.

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The List of My Resources
Product Design
The List of My Resources

A living toolkit — the handful of books, plugins, and models I keep returning to when the work actually has to ship.

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Rivals, Research, Repeat
UX Research
Rivals, Research, Repeat

Competitive research as a rhythm, not a one-off — and why the real insight rarely comes from the first teardown.

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Accessibility by Design — and by Default
Design System
Accessibility by Design — and by Default

When accessibility stops being a checklist and starts being a constraint that improves every other decision in the system.

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More than essays. A way of thinking.

If the decision-making behind these essays resonates, there's more where that came from — in the full portfolio.

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