Designer-engineer. Methodology author.

I dropped out of high school and university. Got a GED. Eventually finished a B.A. in Psychology at UC Santa Barbara, focused on cognitive psychology, human behavior, and decision-making, because the field was the one that actually answered the questions I cared about: how people decide, what they perceive, why two products at the same price point feel different at first glance.

At 23, I co-founded Tantum Technologies in Dublin, CA with a friend I made online as a teenager. We learned our trades by modifying games together. We were approached by a Shark to build the high-traffic websites for Shark Tank’s portfolio. Over five years we shipped 15+ startup ventures and built POS-integrated commerce platforms that handled 160,000 unique visitors in 10 minutes on launch days. I was the sole design function for every one of them.

This is the version of the story where the dropout never gets to here. So a note for anyone reading this who took a similar path: there is no straight line. There is a stack of skills you build because nothing in the curriculum was going to give them to you, and then later you find out that combination is what you are paid for.

Between Tantum and Aurochs there were years of contracting and a detour through improvisational theater at iO from 2015 to 2019. I took the full training course, joined a troop, and performed weekly. Improv taught the soft skills that engineering and design programs do not: active listening, yes-and, reading a room in three seconds.

I joined Simply Smart Home in October 2019 as Lead Product Designer. In June 2022 I became Director of Digital Design, a role I held through December 2024. Over those years I led brand identity, packaging, retail materials, mobile app, ecommerce UI, paid social, OOH (including a Times Square placement in 2022), and the entire B2B retail pitch program. Revenue grew from $1.5M to $5M. The DTC channel grew from under 2% to 15% of revenue. Retail placements landed at Costco, Walmart, Target, Amazon, Home Depot, and Lowe’s. Disney signed a licensing deal. I built a 3D product visualization library in Substance 3D that replaced physical photo shoots. The design department went from outsourced to in-housed with me as the architect.

Concurrent with that, since August 2020 I have served as Technology Director and Brand Strategist at QTBIPOC Design, a nonprofit UX bootcamp and design collective. I helped them start and grow the org, built their first corporate website, instruct designers on WordPress content management and development, and co-host their Creative Chats events with guest speakers. It is still ongoing.

I founded Aurochs in October 2025 as a solo design and engineering practice. The throughline that pulls fifteen years of production work together is Perception-First Design™: a five-layer diagnostic framework grounded in ~100 peer-reviewed citations including Lavie, Damasio, LeDoux, Sweller, and Lang. The trademark was filed 2026-03-06. The methodology ships as a Claude Code skill under CC BY-SA 4.0 + MIT.

Around the methodology I am building tools and writing a book.

Cognograph is a spatial AI workflow canvas approaching launch. Solo build. Electron + React + TypeScript + React Flow + Three.js. Four USPTO provisional patents were filed in February 2026 covering spatial context injection via graph traversal, node-based AI orchestration, spatial triggers and templates, and plan-preview-apply workflows with atomic materialization. Licensed AGPL-3.0 with a Defensive Patent Pledge.

Make Me Think is a 12-chapter book counterpointing Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think. The thesis: usability solved one problem and exposed another. People are already not thinking. The work is to make them feel before they categorize. The book is free as PDF and EPUB at aurochs.agency/writing/make-me-think.

The Aurochs agency line of Claude Code plugins ships from my own workflow. recall is the memory architecture: verbatim drawers, BM25 index, local SQLite, no paraphrasing. voice is the drafting layer: capture text by recipient, route past captures into new drafts. qa-pipeline runs multi-agent fresh-context reviews on plans and shipped work before they go live. llm-scrub catches the regex-detectable LLM tells in prose. seo-geo audits sites for SEO and LLM-discoverability with an optional BYOK LLM judge. fuzzy-tom surfaces theory-of-mind inferences so I can correct them before Claude answers. Each one started because I felt the friction first.

Underneath the agency engagements runs the Aurochs Platform: a bespoke CMS, CRM, commerce stack, and admin platform across eleven packages. The static site generator that renders the client sites. The admin API for content collections, auth, forms, and newsletter. The payments Worker with six processor adapters (Stripe shipped, the rest stubbed against a locked PaymentAdapter contract) and PCI-DSS SAQ-A scope. The media pipeline: R2 presigning, queue-driven processing through a Fly Python worker, EXIF stripping. The status surface for uptime and health. The leadgen pipeline that runs cold subject discovery through to a PFD-scored audit deliverable. The operator CLI for scaffolding, deploying, cutover. A tenant-secret crypto layer underneath all of it. I built it because the alternative was outsourcing the substrate to vendors I cannot read end-to-end.

People look at the work and call it multi-disciplined. Cognitive psychology citations, fifteen years of production design, engineering, methodology authorship, a book. From outside that reads as several distinct disciplines stitched together. From inside it’s the same practice repeated against different material.

The shorthand “designer with a side of code” undersells it. I’m not adding code to design. I’m applying design thinking to whatever surface the problem lives on. When the surface is a Cognograph node-graph, that shows up as spatial trigger logic. When it’s a methodology chapter, it shows up as how a reader gets onboarded to a concept. When it’s an agency engagement, it shows up as the diagnostic-first conversation.

That’s what multi-disciplined means when I use the word. Not several practices in parallel. One practice that travels well.

Aurochs the agency, Cognograph the product, and Perception-First Design the methodology run in parallel. The same hand on all three means the framework gets stress-tested by real engagements, the tools get built from real friction, and the methodology evolves on every iteration.