Creative director, design leader, and builder of AI products. This is the longer version of the story.
The mountains of western Virginia raised me. Appalachia is a storytelling culture: you learn early that how you tell a thing decides whether anyone hears it. That instinct carried me to SCAD, where the storytelling got discipline, and then into twenty years of creative leadership.
The receipts run through entertainment: TMZ, where I formed the brand's first in-house creative team while it scaled from 500K to 6 million social followers. Soda & Lime, where I was a partner and executive creative director. Banijay's unscripted slate. Amazon Studios, where I designed the studio's first public report on inclusion for an audience of 200 million.
Then the machines got interesting. I went hands-on with LLM systems the way I once went hands-on with Photoshop: not as a tourist, but as a practitioner. Today I lead GenUI design at a Google-partner consultancy and run an independent practice building with Claude daily: agent systems, production code, and the workshops that bring whole teams along.
The throughline is taste. AI raised the floor on polish, which makes judgment the scarce skill: knowing which kind of wrong you're looking at, and what considered actually feels like. That's the job now, and I've never enjoyed it more.
Working sessions and talks on AI in creative teams, generative UI, and what design leadership becomes when execution stops proving anything. From two-hour team workshops to org-wide Claude rollouts.
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 write hello@joshuawells.com directly.