DESIGN & BUILD

Hello. I’m Chris. I live in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. I enjoy designing and making things, on the internet and off. Read detailed stories and case studies about digital things I’ve designed and built over on the Work page, or, if you just want the basics, read on.

In 2023 I led work on HackerOne’s design system, U1, built by their PIXL squad. I served as Lead Product Designer and as the squad's acting PM. I even managed to get in a GitLab merge request before getting hit by layoffs! We did the “0.1 to 1.0” work on a system that underlies more and more of the H1 platform every day.

From 2021 to late 2022, I was a Principal Designer at HOVER Inc. leading work on their design system, Blueprint. I worked hand-in-hand as designer, PM, and occasional coding hack with an expert front-end engineer and the design team to deliver tooling and assets that make the lives of HOVER’s designers and developers easier.

In 2020 and early 2021, I worked with San Francisco Digital Services as a Senior UX Designer working on the Housing team, extending and improving the DAHLIA Housing Portal ecosystem and the component library used to build it.

From late 2015 to late 2019, I was at Coursera, working my way up to Principal Designer, concentrating on authoring and administration tools for universities and enterprise customers. I also kicked off work on their then-nascent design sytem. For a year in 2018-2019, I worked in design management, leading the Partner Design team.

For most of 2015 I kept busy doing freelance/contract design and coding work for a variety of clients, including the Bay Area’s Metropolitan Transportation Commission (a mobile-first redesign of their 511 tool), among others.

In 2014 I led the Mobile team as a Product Designer at Piazza, a Q&A platform for academic use. I introduced this early-stage startup to user-centered design processes and did everything from UX research to prototyping to pixel-perfect mockups.

From 2010-2103, I was Lead Product Designer and Front-end Engineer for the civic tech app Neighborland (acquired by Nextdoor in 2019), a platform to empower organizations to collaborate with their stakeholders in an accessible, participatory, and equitable way.

I started my career in tech in 2000 at UC’s Berkley Language Center, where I worked for 10 years. My biggest impact was via doing UX/UI and visual design plus full-stack engineering for the Library of Foreign Language Film Clips (now known as Lumiere), a web app that serves over 10,000 film clips in 50 languages to language instructors and students at 60 colleges and universities across 3 continents.

In the past I’ve also made music and engineered audio recordings. I currently make visual art, and I design and build furniture. Eventually I’ll put some of that work out here on the internet. Eventually.

Thanks for stopping by.