About

The through-line

I've spent fifteen years designing digital experiences that solve real problems — a public procurement site for GSA and the Office of Management and Budget, an enterprise platform that reads patent portfolios, an insurer's move from paper to digital, an open-source library for the history of philosophy.

That list looks scattered until you notice it's the same job every time.

In each one, information that mattered to somebody was organized for the convenience of the organization holding it. Buy American waivers were public and effectively unreachable, buried in a procurement database renowned for being difficult to maneuver. A company's real strength sat in patents, filings, and litigation records that didn't talk to each other. An insurance policy lived in a filing cabinet. Philosophy resists tidy hierarchy, and Khora's audience ran from Oxford professors to digital artists.

The work is always the same shape: find out how people actually think about the thing, derive a structure from that rather than from the org chart, and build it so it holds up when the content changes. I like that work. I've gotten good at it.

Why public service

The most useful four weeks of my career were spent on a two-page website.

In 2021 I was the sole designer on a three-person Ad Hoc team supporting GSA and OMB on Executive Order 14005. The mandate was a public one-stop shop for Buy American waivers — so a manufacturer could find out what the federal government had decided it couldn't source domestically, without having to fight the Federal Procurement Data System for it.

It's live at madeinamerica.gov. It's been through a full content replacement and a change of administration since, and the structure still does what it was built to do.

I want more of that. Not because public work is nobler than commercial work — I've done commercial work I'm proud of and would do again — but because the constraints are more interesting and the stakes are more legible. In government, the person on the other side of the screen usually can't go somewhere else. If the form is confusing, they don't churn; they call, or they give up on something they were entitled to. That's a design problem with a real floor under it, and I'd rather spend my time there.

Public-sector work also rewards the things I'm actually good at. Accessibility as a requirement rather than a preference. Plain language as a legal obligation. Information architecture that has to survive administrations, reorganizations, and complete content rewrites. Those aren't compromises I'd be making to work in this space. They're the reasons I want to.

Teaching

I spent three years as a lecturer at Eastern Washington University, from 2016 to 2019, teaching design to people who were just starting.

That habit never left. At Symetra I built hands-on Figma training for the client's in-house designers — grounded in discussion and practice rather than slides — so they could contribute to the shared library without creating design debt. I wrote the design-to-development handoff guide for the same reason. On every team since, I've ended up being the person who writes the thing down so nobody has to ask twice.

I think this is most of what senior means. The design you personally make has a ceiling. The design a team can make after you've taught them something doesn't.

Credentials

• BFA, Visual Communication Design — Eastern Washington University, 2015
• Associate of Arts — Spokane Falls Community College, 2015
• Named inventor on a filed United States patent for personalized, interactive learning
• U.S. citizen · Spokane, Washington · Available for full-time remote work

Full resume

What I do

Outside of work

I play competitive cornhole and train for marathons. Both are mostly about doing an unglamorous thing correctly a very large number of times, which may explain the design career.

I'm looking for senior design work in public service.

Full-time, fully remote, available now. Email is the fastest way to reach me.

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