Design Systems & Studio Operations
Building the infrastructure that lets
design organizations do their best work.
Most design operations leaders come from project management or production. I came from design.
I was doing motion graphics and interactive design before the discipline had a name, before the tools made it easy, before anyone called it UX. That foundation is what makes me a different kind of design operations leader: I don't manage design from the outside. I understand it from the inside.
Many of my early peers moved on to other fields as the industry shifted and the tools changed. I stayed — not out of inertia, but out of genuine excitement about where this field was going. Every wave brought new challenges and new ways to do the work better: the web, mobile, design systems, AI. I've grown through all of them, and I'm still growing.
Background
My career spans thirty years and three distinct acts. I started in entertainment and advertising — creating broadcast motion graphics for the 1996 Atlanta Olympics and Atlanta Braves, designing Coca-Cola Brasil television campaigns through McCann-Erikson Rio, and building interactive experiences for Turner Classic Movies and WWF. I was making things for the web before most people knew what it was.
From there I moved into large-scale digital properties — Superbowl.com, USOpen.com, Wimbledon.com, Grammys.com — then enterprise software at IBM, AI-powered Watson products, and UX work at Apple. Along the way I built research programs, led accessibility initiatives, and designed systems that had to work for millions of users across dozens of contexts.
For the past several years I've been at USCIS, where I came in as the first-ever Design System Program Manager and built the function from scratch. That work — the component library, the governance frameworks, the design culture — now extends to DHS headquarters and multiple federal agencies.
The through-line across all of it is the same question: how do you build the systems and culture that let creative people do their best work at scale? AI is the next wave, and I'm as excited about it as I was about every wave that came before.
Current Role
U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services — DHS
First person to hold this role — built the design operations infrastructure for a 100+ designer organization from the ground up.
I led the agency's full transition to Figma — managing procurement, IT and security approvals, SSO implementation, and onboarding for 100+ designers. I then built the USCIS Figma Component Library: a 508-compliant system of reusable components that serves as the agency's single source of truth, now adopted by DHS headquarters and shared across multiple federal agencies.
I established the Design System Working Group as the structured review forum that keeps core design and production teams aligned. I launched Figma Fridays and 1:1 design lead syncs to maintain design culture and surface workload issues before they become problems. Most recently I led USCIS's first-ever USWDS compliance audit cycle across all public-facing products, providing actionable remediation guidance across the full portfolio.
Work & Contact
Thirty years of projects across entertainment, advertising, enterprise software, and government.