I grew up in the mountains of southwest Virginia, and if you grow up in Appalachia, you grow up around people who can TELL a story. You learn early that how you say a thing decides whether anyone actually hears it. I chased that instinct to SCAD, where art school put some discipline under it, and somehow that turned into twenty years of leading creative teams.
Most of those years were entertainment. TMZ, back when it was growing from 500K to 6 million followers and needed its first real in-house creative team; I got to build that one. Soda & Lime, where I was partner and executive creative director. Banijay’s unscripted shows. Amazon Studios, where I designed the studio’s first public report on inclusion and watched it go out to 200 million people. Twenty years of “make it good, make it fast, make it land.”
Then AI showed up, the creature exactly nobody asked for, and I did what I’ve always done with a new tool: I started building. Not reading about it, building with it. These days that means AI product design, generative interfaces, agent systems, and sitting with teams to figure out where this stuff actually fits in how they work. Some days it’s strategy. Some days I’m shipping code before lunch.
People keep asking how a designer feels about all this, and the honest answer is we’re dating. Me and AI. I studied this craft. I did the twenty years. And now I share a desk with something that learned my job by watching everyone do it (mine included). Strange relationship. But the sooner you understand how it mimics your work, the sooner you can wrangle it into doing the parts you never loved anyway. So yeah, dating. It’s going well, mostly.
If there’s a throughline, it’s judgment. AI made polish cheap. It did not make GOOD any easier. Somebody still has to know what to build, what to skip, and when a thing is actually ready, and that part stays stubbornly human. It’s also my favorite part.
