Bio

Construction Sites

My father was a general superintendent for general contractors in New York: Bovis, Gotham, Engel Burman. His job was holding the whole picture while fifty trades worked their piece. I grew up on those job sites. Before I understood design theory or information architecture, I understood that a structure either holds or it doesn’t, and the difference is usually in the joints.

That’s still how I think about systems. The interesting question is never “what should this look like?” It’s “where does this fail?”

SVA

Judith Wilde found me at Kingsborough Community College. She saw a sketchbook, took over my schedule, and spent two years steering my development before sending me to SVA.

At the School of Visual Arts, I studied Visual Communication, not graphic design as decoration, but as structural discipline. Swiss grid, typographic hierarchy, information density. Screenprinting was part of the coursework, and I fell in love with it. The faculty shaped how I think: James Victore, Kevin O’Callaghan, Christoph Niemann, Nicholas Blechman, Genevieve Williams, Adam Wahler. I spent time at Victore’s studio in Beacon working with him directly. The through-line from all of them: thinking before making.

Publishing

After graduation, I spent a couple of years in publishing. A short stint in ad/promo at Random House, then Sterling Publishing. Catalogs: hundreds of pages of titles, prices, category breaks, seasonal lists.

Nobody reads a catalog. They navigate it. The grid is the navigation system. Get the hierarchy wrong and the reader gives up before they find what they came for.

I didn’t know it was called information architecture. I called it catalog layout. The question was the same: given this density and this limited attention, where does the eye go first?

Years later, when UX became a defined discipline, I recognized the problem immediately. I’d already been solving it, just with a pica ruler instead of a wireframe tool.

Screenprinting

I left Sterling and got the job at USA Tees in Brooklyn. Art department and production: color separation, technique, prepress. After USA Tees I taught an intro to graphic design course at Kingsborough for a semester, then we moved to Fort Lauderdale, where I worked at Atlas Embroidery.

Separation means you never work on the image. You work on a channel. One color at a time, decomposing a whole into discrete layers that reconstruct it when they register. You make decisions about how colors interact when they overprint (opacity, trapping, bleed) before any of that is visible. The whole composition exists only in your head while you’re building a single plate.

That’s how I’ve worked ever since. Every SCSS cascade, every function chain, every stage in a multi-agent workflow, you’re working on a channel. The whole only exists when the layers register.

Twelve Years at Cluen

Back in New York, I had a project support position at Metis Associates. When that ended, I got the job at Cluen Corporation and became the Principal Architect. The Encore Platform, a recruitment engine serving some of the largest organizations in the world.

Twelve years is a long time to stay with one system. Long enough to see three major technology shifts come and go. Long enough to learn that the hard part isn’t building something. It’s keeping it alive while everything around it changes.

I made the case for moving the platform to the browser, then built it: modular JS framework, full SCSS design system, information architecture across one of the most complex recruiting platforms in the industry. The platform never stopped running while I rebuilt the layer it ran on.

The Household

Breakfast was taking 90 minutes. Not because anyone was slow, because every meal was a decision tree nobody had the bandwidth to run by 7 AM. So I built the infrastructure.

Routines that remove daily decisions. Defaults that work when nobody has the energy to choose. Savepoint Protocol started here, marking moments of stability so you can find your way back when things drift. The same structural discipline I’d been applying to enterprise platforms and brand systems, applied to the place that actually needed it most.

Music

I’ve been making music for as long as I’ve been making anything else. Release is an acoustic singer/songwriter record on all major streaming platforms. MathOnTape is electronic music explorations (dirty analog synths, tape texture) branded as a project so I can work both the audio and the visual identity together.

Neither project has a commercial goal. They’re practice.

The New Material

In 2023, I started using AI as a thinking partner, not to generate work, but to extend the same cognitive process I’d been running in sketchbooks and production shops for twenty years. Brainstorming, pressure-testing structure, organizing ideation that outran what I could hold in my head. The tool was new. The method was the same.

The worst loss was a novel. Months of New City ideation distributed across dozens of sessions, the continuity severed when the sessions closed. That loss built the Savepoint Protocol. The first version failed immediately. Three more before the structure held. Then the same problem surfaced in code: contributors contradicting each other’s architectural decisions. That produced the Formwork Protocol.

The failure modes weren’t new. Joints that can’t carry load, context that drifts when nobody maintains fidelity to it, structures that break when the people operating them can’t see what’s already been decided. I’ve been solving that problem since construction sites. The tools change. The engineering doesn’t.

The Unified Practice

What connects construction sites and code architecture, screenprinting and protocol design, enterprise platforms and family meal systems:

Every one of these is a problem of structural integrity. Building something that holds up under pressure, over time, when the people operating it are tired or distracted or new to the job.