Designing consumer product experiences at the intersection of strategy, systems, and craft.
Staff ~ Lead DesignerOpen to the right opportunitiesSan Francisco, CA Pacific TimeContact
Tools & Experiments
design-token-vitalsGitHubDesign system audit tool. Grades a codebase's design token layer, reports what it cannot prove, and ranks the fixes.
component-contractGitHubDesign system governance: one file per component that both the design decision and the shipped code answer to.
idea-builderGitHubIdeation method: coaches James Webb Young's five stages (gather, connect, incubate, capture, refine) for building an idea from scratch.
Work
Lab
Soothsayer Groovebox MachineA browser-based groovebox and step sequencer, built on Tone.js and the Web Audio API.
Pocket SketchbookPaper and a blue grid in the browser. A drawing surface that keeps what you make.
Design By BulletinAn always-on bot that researches, writes and art-directs a design magazine on a schedule.
Major ArcanaA tarot deck and reading machine, drawn and dealt in the browser. Card art generated with Midjourney.
Experience
Raptive
Staff Product Designer
Miguel Arias Creative
Design Consultant & Founder
Nextdoor
Staff Product Designer, Growth
Zillow Group
Sr. Product Designer, Design Systems
The logic chain
2000
Underground
Designer and developer at Noctámbulo, an early online magazine in Puerto Rico's underground. Each issue had a live forum.
2003
Study
Design and visual communications at Universidad Sagrado Corazón, then Savannah College of Art & Design, while Noctámbulo still ran.
2005
Interactive
Web development at a marketing agency, then interactive art direction for a financial literacy startup, Benefit Cosmetics, and Shutterfly.
2011
Editorial
Illustration and design for The Bold Italic, also published in Computer Arts and SF Weekly.
2014
Agency
Fitbit, Nest, AKQA, StubHub, where mobile design began. Campaigns built with Apple's design team, and StubHub's responsive component library.
2016
Product
Trulia, Zillow, Nextdoor. Design systems at 100% adoption across four products; Neighborhood Faves from 9M votes to 16M.
2022
AI
Nextdoor: generative AI business discovery lifting in-comment recommendations 84%. Now at Raptive, a new environment built in four weeks.
Toolbox
Mock before build.
What the business needs, how the product works, and what the design intends rarely agree on the first pass. A mock finds where they conflict before code has to pick a side. I build the mock against the real token library, so the mock and the shipped page never drift apart.
- Claude Code
- Cursor
- Midjourney
- Figma
- HTML · CSS
- JavaScript
- React · Next.js
- Tailwind · TypeScript
- Conductor
- Playwright
- Browser dev tools
- Design tokens
- Netlify
- Vercel
- GitHub