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 a project bar dimensioned zero to one hundred: the first eighty percent drawn plain and labeled an afternoon now, the final twenty percent hatched in red and labeled full price, with a detail circle magnifying the hatched zone and an inspection table where only the happy path is marked pass. A margin note in italic serif reads it worked in the demo. The title block reads scale none, hardened by eye. 031 · Nov 2026 The Last 20% Didn't Get Cheaper. The first 80 percent of building collapsed in price. The last 20, the empty states, the expired card, the docs that lie, costs what it always did, and it's most of the invoice now. A demo is built out of the cheap part. A product is mostly the rest. A mechanical drawing of a distribution: a bell curve with output dots piled in the middle band labeled where everyone lands, a red median centerline, and one red dot out on the shoulder with a leader labeled chosen, name attached. The approvals table lists drawn by the model, signed by nobody. A margin note in italic serif reads nobody signed it, it shows. The title block reads scale none, signed by eye. 030 · Nov 2026 Slop Is a Choice. Everyone points at the model. But slop was never a capability failure: it's output nobody claimed, published with nobody home. The same model, the same brief, and one person with an opinion produce something else entirely. A mechanical drawing of a straight red drafting line labeled the line, running down the sheet through a column of client boxes. Two hatched boxes sit on the far side of it, one priced fifteen hundred dollars and one priced one hundred fifty thousand, both struck through. A dashed detour path around the expensive one is crossed out and marked deleted in rev B. A margin note in italic serif reads the line doesn't curve. The title block reads scale none, no carve-outs. 029 · Oct 2026 The Morality Clause. Turning down a project on principle is one of design's favorite stories. Here's the fine print: that 'NOPE!' wrote a clause into your whole practice. Where your line sits is your business. Whether it holds is the whole question.
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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