Objects
Reference objects
Eight objects, old and new, that each got something right by doing less — including a 2022 handheld you crank by hand.
Whole Earth Catalog
A catalog is only useful because somebody decided what belongs in it. I keep this one close as a reminder that the editing is the product.
iMac G3
A friendly computer with an actual body. It's the reason I keep asking whether a thing needs three tabs when it could get by on one.
Macintosh 128K
A computer designed as a desk object, handle included.
iPod click wheel
A thousand songs behind one wheel. A thousand of anything is useless until something gives you a way to reach the one you want.
Sony Walkman
It made listening private and portable, and it never needed a manual to change how people behaved.
Playdate
A little yellow handheld from 2022 with a crank on the side. It hands you a couple of small games a week and then mostly just sits there, and somehow that's the whole appeal.
Polaroid SX-70
The photograph came out while you were still standing there.
Braun ET66
Every button tells you what it does before you press it. Nothing on it is there to look clever.
What I bring
Seven projects, picked for range: brand identity, code I actually shipped, hard product calls, the unglamorous operations work, one startup that made it to market, and media systems. Each has a line on what it took to make. A couple are still being built.
Client work below is anonymous on purpose: names stay out of the copy, the image files, and the page source. Check — it's all viewable. The one name you will find is an employer, which is public record anyway. Your work would get the same discretion. Specifics and process files come out in conversation.
Identity that finds the object.
Twenty-two rounds to rebuild a mark around the one feature it already had, most of them spent taking things back out.
Product shaped by code.
The app plays whole records from a small crate of your own files. I write the code as well as the strategy, which keeps the strategy honest.
Moved, not deleted.
Disk cleaners want to delete your files. This one moves them instead: heavy files land on a drive you own, every path keeps working, and one click brings anything back.
Media language that can travel.
A product promise read well in English and fell flat elsewhere. The fix was a voice system: intent stays fixed, the language stays native, and nothing ships sounding like a committee translated it.
Startup from zero to shipped.
A hiring product that cut a messy process down to watch, respond, submit. I named it, built the brand, designed the flow, and launched it. The product didn't make it, which is why the tag reads archive.
Five years in the console.
Five years around cloud console software, where the architectures are big and the users are in a hurry. I'm comfortable in difficult software and careful with tools people use under pressure.
The work gets organized enough to ship.
Taste doesn't ship anything by itself. Somebody has to turn files, scenes, deadlines, and decisions into a sequence a crew can execute. I've run that layer.
If your problem rhymes with any of these, the three questions take about five minutes.
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