About
I design, and I direct designers. Most of my career has been spent in house, at organizations where the subject is complicated and the people they serve are the point.
How I work
I have spent my career designing for organizations that work in refugee protection, global health, philanthropy and international development. These are subjects that take a paragraph to explain and get about a second to land, which means the design has to carry much of the explaining. In practice that has meant building identity systems that hold together across twenty offices, running campaigns in several languages, and making templates a communications team can pick up and use without calling me.
Those organizations have been HIAS, the International Rescue Committee, Population Services International and Palladium. At the International Rescue Committee I hired as many as seven designers and directed up to twelve people with agencies and freelancers. Through all of it I have kept opening the files myself. Everything on this site is work I designed or directed, and wherever an agency contributed I have said so.
I have worked on the agency side as well, on contract with Graphicacy, where I designed and art directed data visualization for clients including Georgetown, 350 Action and Orb Media.
I came to design from engineering. I worked as a software engineer and then in international technology business, and that background still shows in the way I handle systems and constraints, and in how easily the conversations with developers go.
I studied graphic and web design at Boston University, and I ran the programs at its Center for Digital Imaging Arts, where I taught graphic design and web development, and modernized the curriculum. My earlier degrees are an MPA in international economics from Harvard and electrical engineering degrees from Rutgers and the University of Vermont.
Since 2025 I have run a design practice for mission-led clients, often working embedded in their teams.