Journey Into The Past
I wanted to be a graphic designer. Life had other plans.
Before I ever touched a wireframe, I spent four years on film sets, working as a technician on TV shows and movies while writing and shooting on the side. It was good work. Genuinely. But the whole time, I kept thinking about design. About those insanely cool flash interfaces showing up on the FWA. About the thing I'd originally set out to do.
So in my spare time, I started building websites. Terrible ones. (I mean genuinely bad. The kind of sites that would make a 2004 MySpace page look restrained.) I had the ambition but none of the foundation, and I knew it. BCIT fixed that. I went back to school, got serious about digital media and development, and came out the other side with my first real job as a front-end developer and designer.
From there the title evolved faster than the skills could keep up. Interactive art director, specifically the non-traditional kind. Not an ad guy in a blazer. More of a hybrid: part developer, part designer, part digital storyteller who couldn't quite commit to one lane.
What I found in that work was that the problems were what kept me interested. Not the screens. Not the pixels. The problems. User experience design was the name for what I'd apparently been doing all along. I just hadn't known it yet. That realization was fourteen years ago, and I haven't looked for another path since.
Where my heart likes to dwell
My Experience. My Journey
Fifteen years across marketing, healthcare, and supply chain compliance. Three industries that have almost nothing in common, except that all of them had users who needed someone to give a damn.
That's the throughline for me. Not the domains, not the titles. The problems. Specifically, the two kinds that have kept me interested long enough to build a career around them: the ones users run into every day and can't quite name, and the ones that make a design team feel like a real team instead of a ticket queue.
I've won awards. I've worked with clients worth bragging about. I've shipped products I'm still proud of, with people who cared as much about the details as I did. But the thing I keep coming back to is the work that didn't make it onto a slide deck. The designer who finally felt confident enough to push back in a product review. The user flow that got rebuilt from scratch because someone on the team asked the right question at the wrong time. That stuff doesn't show up in metrics, but it's what actually compounds.
My leadership approach isn't complicated: create the conditions for good work, get out of the way, and make sure the people doing it know their instincts are worth trusting.
Highlights
Please download my Resume for additional information about me, my background, education and accomplishments.