Twenty-five years of taste & craft, applied.

Art school doesn’t teach you software. It teaches you to see — to stand in front of the work, say what’s wrong with it out loud, and defend what’s right. My MFA from CCA is fifteen years old and I use it every single day, because critique is the core act of design leadership: knowing what good is, saying so clearly, and holding the bar without crushing the person.

Tools have never mattered less. I’ve outlived Flash, watched platforms rise and die, and now work alongside AI daily. What survives every wave is taste — the trained judgment to tell almost right from right. That’s the last defensible skill, and it’s the thing I bring into every room.

Taste without craft is just opinion. I still prototype, still push pixels, still write the copy when the copy is the problem — at Socrates.AI I relaunched the entire website and value proposition single-handedly. Staying hands-on isn’t a failure to delegate; it’s how a leader keeps the right to have standards.

“A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Still true. Harder than ever.

What twenty-five years taught me that the younger version of me didn’t know: the work is the people. I’ve built design teams from nothing (employee #6, twice-founding creative), grown them (recruited and managed designers at TechTV through years of scale), and coached them inside the world’s largest asset manager. The products ship and fade; the designers you grow keep shipping for decades.

The rest of my philosophy hasn’t changed, just compounded: ideate your ass off. Humor is a Trojan horse for your message. Always be nice — projects are transactions, and I try to give more than I take. And writing matters, a lot: solutions need to be framed, and someone has to rally the room.

I designed AI products before the boom (Espressive, Socrates.AI), filed AI patents inside BlackRock during it, and build with AI tools every day — this site included. Here’s what I tell founders and executives: AI just made execution cheap, which makes judgment expensive. You can generate a hundred versions of anything now. The scarce skill is knowing which one is right, why, and what it will do to your brand, your users, and your bottom line. That’s a design leadership problem, and it’s the most interesting one of my career.

Outside the work: music, always. I’ve led design at two music startups, once installed a vintage stereo system in an office because culture is built in small ways (it worked — people came in early to play records), and will defend Boards of Canada as serious design inspiration. At my first network job I was occasionally on air, and somewhere along the way I met Chuck D and Brian Eno. Only one of them gave design feedback.