I studied English at UNC Chapel Hill, which is a weird place to start a design career, except it isn’t — writing is design. It’s information architecture with sentences instead of wireframes.
At 21, I founded and ran Anatomy Magazine, a quarterly digital men’s magazine, for four years. I managed a team of 25 writers, designers, and photographers, wrote more blog posts than I’d like to count, and interviewed people like Diplo, J. Cole, and Brother Ali along the way. That job taught me production, deadlines, and how to lead a team toward something that actually ships.
Every one of those jobs was, in hindsight, training for the same thing: understanding how people read, scan, click, and decide.
Somewhere around 2021, that turned explicitly into UI/UX. I built out information architecture, user flows, and prototypes for SMRT Systems’ app. I served as lead UI designer on a U.S. Army software project that won a SOCOM innovation award.