About Jeremy
Jeremy Fuksa is a senior design leader and consultant — 30 years across design systems, UX strategy, and AI-augmented design. Based in Kansas City.
In the spring of 1996 I was an Oklahoma State undergrad reading Teach Yourself HTML in 24 Hours instead of going to class. I put the pages I made on my university Unix account, and campus IT found them during an account-usage audit — which ultimately turned into a demo request from the Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education. Their presentation room had no internet, so I put a 3.5" floppy into a computer and showed them this new thing called the World Wide Web.
My grades suffered. My career did not.
Most of the first fifteen years ran through marketing and advertising — local car ads at the bottom, national brands by the end. My first gig had me as animator, video editor, and web guy. My first full-time web job was for an online pharmacy, one of the first sites that let patients manage prescriptions and deliveries online. The company was acquired in 2001 and I was laid off because the new owners decided the internet was a fad for the sixty-five-and-over demographic. After the pharmacy, another decade-plus at studios and agencies — always the web guy, always building whatever digital meant that year.
Enterprise healthcare came next — design systems at Cerner, then design leadership through Oracle's acquisition. Oracle Health laid me off in the infamous 5 a.m. 30,000-person email.
I've been teaching myself new tools ever since that HTML book. AI was the latest — goofy image generation at first, now refining a practice for making better designs through better context. That's Domain Foundation.
The Cocktail Napkin has been my blog and podcast since the mid-2000s, back when I was a D-list internet celebrity. This is the current form.
Off the clock I'm a licensed ham (KF0NUI) who spends more time on the gear than on the air, mashing jazz and alt-country together, or building something at the bench that probably didn't need to be built.