The Art Room Had a Math Problem

I was an art student who loved math. That sentence still raises eyebrows.

In high school, I lettered in art, one of the first at my school to do so, and my art teacher genuinely could not reconcile it. Here was a kid who filled sketchbooks, took every studio class available, and also got excited about equations. She'd look at me sideways when I'd mention that I actually liked math. Most of her students didn't. Most art students don't.

Puzzles Dressed Up as Equations

But I never saw math as cold or mechanical. I saw it as puzzles. Elegant little systems with rules you could learn, bend, and eventually use to find your way through to something satisfying on the other side. That framing changed everything for me. It made math feel creative.

The Inevitable Destination

I think that's why user experience felt so inevitable when I eventually found it. UX is fundamentally a puzzle discipline. You have a person, a goal, a context, a set of constraints, and your job is to find the path that makes the whole thing feel effortless. The satisfaction of cracking a good UX problem isn't that different from the satisfaction of working through a proof or untangling a design system that's gotten away from itself. There's a moment when it clicks. I live for that moment.

Knowing the Seams

What I've spent a career doing is finding ways to keep those two sides of myself working in the same direction. The maker and the systems thinker. Early on, that meant learning to code alongside design, not as a separate discipline but as a natural extension of it. If I could design it, I wanted to understand how it was built. Not because I needed to be the one building it, but because the gap between intention and implementation is where a lot of good design goes to die. Knowing the seams matters.

The Most Alive It's Ever Been

Over time, that instinct grew into something more deliberate. The intersection of design and engineering is the most interesting place I know. It's where craft meets consequence. And now, with AI reshaping both sides of that equation simultaneously, it feels like the most alive it's ever been.

Still Chasing Clicks

This portfolio and this blog exist because I still get genuinely excited about the work. Not just the outcomes or the strategy, but the actual making. The push and pull between structure and creativity, the moment a complex system resolves into something a human being can navigate without thinking about it. That's the puzzle. That's what gets me out of bed.

I hope some of that comes through here.