First, some work outside of interfaces from the past decade or so.
For Lapham’s Quarterly (an essay about searching for happiness while reading about hell, a collage piece as an act of living through history) and n+1 (a critique of how William Shockley’s eugenics reverberate through Silicon Valley history), among other places.
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HF
In my heart, most often I feel like an editor, even when my title has been “strategist” or “architect” or “producer” or “designer” — I think because editing, to me, is bringing meaning together through language, meaning, and form.
I’ve held many titles and positions at publications, institutions, studios, foundries, agencies, and brands.
I’ve released music in various forms for much of my life, some I willingly share, some I shamefully hide. Most recent was an album as Absent City called Continue Normal Living back in 2020. I run a little Bay-based coop label to support local music called Homing Instinct Records.
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I’m in Maxwell Park, in East Oakland, in a small house. Before this I was in Brooklyn for more than a decade, had a short stay in Atlanta, went to college in Providence, and was born and raised in a very different Mountain View, California, than the one weirdly widely known today.
In this house, my wife and I try to keep alive two boys, 3 and 6, as well as two cats, one dumb, one smart.
I was hired in 2023 to cover what we called Production Experience: prototyping, design systems, and developer tools. With team growth and shifts, I’ve come into a role as lead UX writer for our Editor and Build pillars, with particular focus on AI and code tools.
I joined in 2019 as an IC focused on trust, safety, and privacy. Grammarly didn’t yet have a design team organized as such. I scaled and led the Writing and Content Design team — creating human-centered content and copy experiences across product, growth, and brand.
Here’s an interactive component I built in Figma as an attempt to standardize some decision-making across teams using the methods we were invested in.
In practice, of course, there is a lot more to defining a product space. Style rules, voice frameworks, diagrams, conceptual boundaries.
Still, I find something active and inspiring about words in their primitive, active forms. I wrote an article for Figma’s blog inspired by this.
How could we manage a more complex experience, bringing together multiple layers and levels of information?
What if we leaned into the Figma interface itself?
Exploring a mix of structured and unstructured content to see what information is best carried how.
A framework for organizing language work into complementary (not quite adversarial) pillars, each with its own purpose.
Like many of us, I often write to think, so I went long-form to detail my approach and get some feedback.
Being AI-native, code-native, terminal-native was critical. Language lives on prod in its final form; everything else needs to guide there.
A way to explore and view what’s happening across 300+ different files in the monorepo.
Fake content, real practice.
From Code Connect to code layers to a prompt-to-app product — the language work behind Figma Make.