I build things that are beautifuland a joy to work with

I’m Josh. Twenty years of creating experiences and launching products for TMZ, Banijay, and Amazon MGM Studios. I find what’s not working and design a better way forward.

Got a thing in mind? Tell me about it.

Start a conversation → Read the journal

Available now, full-time or by the project.

Services

Three ways to bring me in.

Creative, product, and AI. Most projects start in one and end up needing all three. I design and build experiences, end to end: the brand, the website, and the product behind it. Mostly that means taking a system that got complex and making it a delight to use, easy to run, and effortless to explain.

Creative

The look, and the system that keeps it. Brand identity, campaigns and key art, the decks and reports that have to land, video and social. Senior direction, full-time or fractional.

  • Brand & identity
  • Campaigns, key art & social
  • Decks, reports & video

Product

I design it, then I build it. Websites and shops, and the platforms a business actually runs on: booking, payments, the admin desk. The thing that ships is the thing we agreed on, and I keep it running.

  • Websites & shops
  • Platforms & admin desks
  • Design systems that reach production

AI

AI where it earns its place. Inside the product as a feature people keep using, inside the workflow as pipelines and agents, and taught to teams so it sticks.

  • AI features & generative UI
  • Pipelines & agents
  • Workshops & rollouts
What each one looks like in practice. All services →
Work

The things that shipped.

Entertainment, studios, a London clinic, and my own studio. Every one of these has the whole story behind it, and most of them have the actual screens.

A calm room in a London townhouse: a linen armchair, a wooden desk with a closed laptop, and a teal wall Pain Psychology Centre UK A practice, built end to end. The identity, the public site, and the operations desk a London pain practice runs on. Designed, built, and still run by me. Role Design, build, and run Discipline IdentityWebProductOperations Shipped Site June 2026Platform July 2026Practice open September 2026 Stack Next.jsReactFirebase (London)StripeDocuSeal Read the case study →
A designer’s desk at night: one glowing monitor, a brass lamp, a notebook, and a coffee cup Joshua Wells Studio. Sites, marks, products, and a shop, shipped by one designer working with AI. This is the current chapter. A newsroom at dawn: rows of monitors, a wall of screens, and one person walking past in motion blur TMZ. I started at TMZ as a Senior Art Director and became its first Creative Director. The job was to make the show, the sites, the app, and the ads look like one company, at the speed of the news. An empty screening room: a projector beam through haze toward a blank screen Amazon MGM Studios. Four years at Amazon Studios in two jobs: the producer and designer behind internal communications, then the creative lead for the studio’s inclusion team and its public report.
Journal

AI, design, and what the job is turning into.

Written from inside the work, usually because something bugged me enough to go figure it out.

A mechanical drawing of two routes between the same two points. The top route is a tangled, dashed line that loops back on itself, labeled the way it usually goes. The bottom route is one straight red line with ten numbered station ticks along it, and a small loop at the end labeled one more thing. A margin note in italic serif reads life's complicated enough. the work doesn't have to be. The title block reads scale none, simplified by eye. 028 · Oct 2026 Life's Complicated Enough. Design, and using what gets designed, should be a streamlined and enjoyable thing. It usually isn't. Here are ten habits from twenty years of making things for people that put some of the joy back, for me and for the people I get to work with. None of them is a system. Most of them are manners. A mechanical drawing of a building code, not a building. A section through a stair with the riser height dimensioned in red, a bedroom window marked as egress, a railing called out where the drop is more than a set height. Beneath it, three very different small houses drawn inside the same red rules. A margin note in italic serif reads it doesn't draw the house. it says what can't happen. The title block reads scale none, ruled by eye. 027 · Sep 2026 What's Left to Design When the Screen Is Generated? If the model assembles the interface at runtime, what is the designer for? I thought the answer was 'less.' Then I spent a year designing generative pages for ten industries and the job didn't shrink. It moved. The screen stopped being the deliverable, and the rules the screen gets built from became it. A mechanical drawing of a meeting agenda as a timeline. Item one, status, is struck through. From item two, the layout problem, an old dashed route detours far off the agenda through tracker, queue, round three, and recap, stamped six days, route superseded, arriving at live six days later. A short red centerline drops straight from item two to a red node labeled fix live, delta t four minutes, with a margin note reading they refreshed before item three. The title block reads scale none, elapsed time by eye. 026 · Sep 2026 Before the Meeting Ends. A client flagged a problem mid-call, and the fix was live before the next agenda item. Most of design process turns out to be scar tissue around the cost of revision, and the cost just left.
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About

Mountains, then art school, then twenty years of this.

A quick intro: where I come from, who I've built for, and how I ended up here.

The mountains of western Virginia raised me. Appalachia gave me the storytelling, SCAD gave me the discipline, and twenty years of leading creative teams gave me the judgment to know when something works.

I've built brands for Amazon MGM Studios, TMZ, and Banijay, served as partner and ECD at an agency, and these days I design and build the whole product for the people I work with, AI included. Whatever the tools happen to be in a given decade, the job comes down to the same three things: understand people, solve the right problem, and make something worth using.

RoleDesign & Product Architect
BasedLos Angeles, CA
NowIndependent, and taking on new work
ToolsClaude · GPT · Gemini · Figma · the rest as needed
EducationSCAD — MFA Design Management, BFA Advertising
MoreFull story →
/ 05 — Contact

So what are you working on?

Tell me what you're building and where it's stuck. I'll tell you honestly whether I'm the right person for it.

Open the page

So what are you working on?

Tell me what you're building and where it's stuck. I'll tell you honestly whether I'm the right person for it.

or hello@joshuawells.com