Writing

Designed and built solo at Shanda. A design system that people and models read from the same source, so a team with no front-end engineers can ship product.

Twenty-five years writing code, nineteen years designing. I never picked a side, and not by accident. Then the handoff stopped going to people and started going to a model, so I built the thing my team had no engineer to build.

Four named text styles. Two visible sizes. A tidy rounding rule had quietly flattened the hierarchy while every number still looked correct. On specimen pages, and why AI is a generous proposer and a terrible pruner.

A cartoon assistant users liked converted no one. On the Japanese site, the terms-of-service page ranked ninth among all pages visited. Two markets on one design system — what changed wasn't the structure, but what counts as evidence.

Every AI product is racing to remember everything about you. Forgetting is a feature. Mine remembers two things, what worked and what burned me, and refuses to guess at anything in between.

Nearly every page on the internet is one column falling forever. Print solved this centuries ago. The web didn't, and neither did the design tools, which is the actual reason. So I built the component instead of the mockup.

Under 1% of paid social visitors reached the leaderboard. 85% of LinkedIn visitors did, even on mobile. How I designed and built for the right users, solo, with a schema-driven design system.

Design and code never lined up because the bilingual party in the middle didn't exist. Now it does. Layered tokens, OKLCH, and why I cut the agent's vocabulary from 44 slots down to 32. The constraint is on the agent, not on you.

Where does UX end? Not at the receipt page. A checkbox that refuses to be a checkbox, three webhook nodes nobody calls design, and the difference between a stranger at the door and someone the system was expecting.