Complex systems. Decisions people can defend.

I started by making screens. Fourteen years later I spend most of my time on the decision that made the screen necessary — and then I stay until it ships, because a decision nobody implements is just an opinion.

The domains have varied more than the problem has. Legal review teams, exchange product teams, training operations: different rooms, same shape. Several roles who don’t trust each other by default, a rulebook somebody else wrote, and a screen that has to be right the first time.

Twice the design team’s day-to-day ran through me — nine designers in one company, twelve in another, where I also scoped and assigned the front-end team’s work. Most of that job was allocation, review and estimation: who takes what at what capacity, what a piece of work costs before anyone promises it to a client, and when a file is not finished yet. The bar was the same one every time — a designer should be able to say why the screen is like that, not only what is on it. The graphic designer sitting next to me at 4iG left that job shipping his own HTML and CSS.

I still write front-end code. Every interface on this site is mine, rebuilt from scratch — partly because it is the honest way to show work I cannot screenshot, and partly because I don’t think you can specify what you can’t build.