illustrator & Designer
Brand & Identity, Illustration
When I joined Circle as a product designer, I was hired, in part, for my background in illustration. But that “nice to have” soon became my central focus. I’ve spent years defining and evolving the Circle illustrative brand, cementing its place in our products, website, marketing campaigns, and more.
When I joined Circle as its third product designer, Circle Pay was available on iOS, Android, and the web. With my arrival, each designer could focus on a single platform. In my case, that meant our oldest app, Circle Pay for web. As I tackled the design of new features, I also sought to untangle inconsistencies, improve our internal design and development workflows, and build a solid, scalable foundation for the app’s future.
With the limitations of a small design team, early versions of Circle Pay primarily relied upon off-the-shelf icon sets. But after I joined and began creating illustrations for product and brand, I soon set my sights on icons. I made a few as needed, but replacing the old set entirely wasn't worth the design and development commitment. But with Circle Invest, I was there from the beginning.
As a financial tech startup, Circle’s apps have always needed to represent currency. Circle Pay got its start as a Bitcoin wallet, and within a couple years added US Dollars, British Pounds, and Euros. Custom icons were made for these four currencies, showing up throughout the app and its marketing.
But Circle Invest called for even more. The app offers _thirteen_ different crypto assets. Presenting these disparate crypto projects in a coherent and consistent way would advance Invest's mission to make crypto more approachable. I set out to create a unified set of crypto icons. Easier said than done…
In 2013, a team within Intel’s R&D division called the “Perceptual Computing Group” approached Fresh Tilled Soil with a curious bit of technology: a depth-sensing camera that could recognize objects in 3D space. Paired with the right software, this would enable computers to understand human hand gestures. My colleagues and I designed and developed a fully-functioning prototype application that would demonstrate the technology’s extraordinary potential.
Writing, Personal Projects, Product Design
As a Product Designer & Illustrator at Circle, it’s my job to manage and grow our custom icon set. I’ve built each icon according to the system Steve Stone outlined in Icon Sets with color override in Sketch. It's great …with one caveat. Sometimes, a designer needs to venture outside the brand palette.
Note: I have also published a version of this post to Medium
For more than 80 years, Titleist has made “the #1 ball in golf.” The storied company came to Fresh Tilled Soil with a website that had grown too cumbersome; it was inflexible, mobile unfriendly, and in need of a visual and UX overhaul. Our team set out to craft a modern, fully responsive site that captured the brand’s timeless classicism. I worked alongside some of Fresh Tilled Soil's most senior creative talent, and contributed to the project's visual design, conceptual development, wireframing, prototyping, icon design, and more.
In partnership with Art of Context and Massport, Fresh Tilled Soil overhauled the terminal maps for Boston Logan International Airport. I was proud to lead the design efforts, using our human-centered design process to create entirely new mapping assets that have since been used by tens of millions of travelers.
Rethink Robotics makes extraordinary robots for manufacturing and scientific research. At the company’s core is a profound vision of the relationship between humans and robots, and no wonder—co-founder Rodney Brooks is a robotics pioneer. That vision, however, was lost in its website, buried by a complex information architecture and unfocused design. The site Fresh Tilled Soil crafted better illustrates Rethink’s compelling narrative and serves as a flexible platform for their future growth.
The team at MoveableCode saw an opportunity: technology could enable new directions in storytelling and gaming, using the virtual to connect us with our physical world like never before. The result was Incantor, an innovative mobile game that sought to make magic real. Along with my colleagues at Fresh Tilled Soil, I helped to refine and design the game, from its mechanics and mythology to its unique visual language.
From 2012–2015, I co-hosted and co-produced Fresh Tilled Soil's podcast alongside my colleagues Tim Wright and Steve Hickey. Over the course of 150+ episodes we interviewed extraordinary leaders from Pentagram, Twitter, NASA JPL, Adobe, Etsy, Mozilla, Basecamp, Shopify, and more. Our goal was to produce an engaging and timeless resource for product desigers, entrepreneurs, and developers, carefully balancing education and entertainment.
Brand & Identity, Product Design, Illustration
CloudKid is an extraordinary, Emmy-nominated creative agency specializing in animation and interactive children's media. As a member of their team in 2011, I proudly contributed to a number of client projects, primarily a suite of games for the fantastic Fizzy's Lunch Lab.