Notes

Writing on systems, craft, and building.

Occasional notes on design systems, design engineering, and working at the intersection of design and AI.

3 August 2026 · 8 min read

Thirty-Eight Years of Low Tide

A goodbye letter to Thorpe Bay: thirty-eight years of mudflats, runner-up trophies, seafront donuts, and the heartbreak of leaving the place that built me.

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3 August 2026 · 8 min read

Put the Object in the Room

Six meetings on the same feature, forty-two frames, and a room that would not decide. What changed when I stopped showing pictures and built a working prototype.

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31 July 2026 · 7 min read

The Quietest Person in the Room Is Often Doing the Most Work

Meetings pay out on airtime, not thinking. A case for the people who chew on ideas, from someone who has been both the talker and the silent one.

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19 July 2026 · 6 min read

Clocking Off

On a question my daughter asked me, a promise I made in a hospital bed, and why logging off at the same time every day made me better at the work I love.

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4 July 2026 · 4 min read

The tree is the URL: a tree testing tool with no backend

Tree testing validates navigation before you design a pixel. Commercial tools gate it behind subscriptions, but it's text, tasks, and paths. So I built a free one the same way as the card sort.

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4 July 2026 · 4 min read

AI didn't lower the craft bar. It exposed who never had it.

Show two designers the same AI-generated screen and you'll get two different reads. One sees a finished artifact. The other sees four decisions nobody made. That gap has always existed. AI just made it visible faster.

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3 July 2026 · 4 min read

The study is the URL: a card sorting tool with no backend

Research tools put card sorting behind a subscription. It's a solved interaction pattern and a small data model, so I built a free one into this site. Here's what got cut and why.

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