One designer, shipping like a studio.

If you’ve read the journal, this is the page it all comes from. My current work is a marriage of three things: twenty years of creative direction, an independent practice, and AI tooling wired into every step of it. Not three jobs. One practice.

The setup is deliberately small: one designer. The output isn’t: product design, launch creative, email programs, analytics, internal tools, and the systems that hold them together, shipped at a pace that used to take a team. What changed the math is the AI layer, and everything I learned building creative systems for studios before it.

Here’s how I actually use AI, because it’s not “the machine designs it.” The judgment is still mine: what to build, what good looks like, what gets killed. What the AI layer removes is everything between the judgment and the shipping. Production, build, deploy, data pulls, the second and third variants, the documentation. The parts that used to need a staff.

That’s the same systems instinct I ran at Amazon, pointed at a studio of one. Design the machine, then protect the quality bar it runs at.

One end of the practice is enterprise GenUI. The shape I keep meeting: an assistant that started life as a chatbot, where a guest with a reservation issue, a loyalty member checking a balance, and a corporate planner staging a group booking all hit the same blinking cursor.

The fix is to stop treating it as a chatbot and treat it as an orchestrator: the model composes the right interface for the moment from a defined library of patterns. A reservation issue surfaces a resolution flow; a group booking generates planning utilities. The philosophy is public in GenUI Is Not a Chat Window. The specifics travel by conversation.

The other end is an embedded studio relationship with a national performance-media company. I can’t name them or their brands, but I can tell you what one designer plus the AI layer has shipped there: landing-page systems delivered as production-ready code, multi-email lifecycle programs designed and built end to end, cross-domain analytics and attribution wired into the funnels, content hubs stood up from nothing, live campaign dashboards with prize-draw tooling, and an internal graphics generator their team now runs without me.

That list used to be five vendors. The reason it isn’t: every deliverable gets built as a system with a review URL, so approval, revision, and handoff all happen against the real thing.

The practice has one non-negotiable, and it’s the closest thing I have to a brand promise: nothing ships as an attachment. Work lands deployed, I verify it on production myself, and THEN I tell you it’s done. Clients review live pages, not mockups of pages. I wrote up why in I Stopped Delivering Files.

If any of this sounds like your situation, whether that’s an AI product that needs design judgment or a business that needs a studio without hiring one, the detailed work travels by conversation. Get in touch.