Designing consumer product experiences at the intersection of strategy, systems, and craft to make the complex and ambiguous feel clear and human.
Staff ~ Lead DesignerOpen to the right opportunitiesSan Francisco, CA Pacific TimeContact
Tools & Experiments
design-token-vitalsGrades a codebase's design token layer, reports what it cannot prove, and ranks the fixes into a next move.
component-contractOne small file per component that both the design decision and the shipped code answer to.
idea-builderCoaches James Webb Young's five-stage method — 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.
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, which pioneered online magazines in Puerto Rico's underground — each with its own live forum.
2003
Study
Design and visual communications at Universidad Sagrado Corazón, then Savannah College of Art & Design — overlapping Noctámbulo, not following it.
2005
Interactive
Web development at a marketing agency, then interactive art direction — 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, 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
Began at Nextdoor with gen-AI business discovery, lifting in-comment recommendations 84% — now at Raptive, a 0→1 environment in four weeks.
Toolbox
Mock before build.
Business requirements, product logic, and design intent rarely agree on the first pass. Mocking finds where they conflict before code has to pick a side. I build against the production token library from the start, so the static version and the shipped one are never speaking different languages.
- Claude Code
- Cursor
- Midjourney
- Figma
- HTML · CSS
- JavaScript
- React · Next.js
- Tailwind · TypeScript
- Conductor
- Playwright
- Browser dev tools
- Design tokens
- Netlify
- Vercel
- GitHub