About
Thirty years of design work, mostly on the web. Mostly building the systems other designers and engineers ship on top of. The current work is the same problem one layer up — institutional judgment, in a form AI can use.
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 audit — which somehow 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.
My first real web job was building med4home.com, an online pharmacy in Liberty, Missouri that sold COPD and asthma treatments by mail. I designed the customer site and an internal intranet, both wired to a Sybase SQLAnywhere database through Microsoft ASP. Patients could refill prescriptions online, which was novel. Lincare Holdings acquired the company in 2002 and laid me off because, in their judgment, the sixty-five-and-over demographic was never going to use the internet for refills.
Then a decade I'll tell in storefronts: TV commercial production at Skyline Media Group (employee #3, in a converted Honda dealership in Norman, OK); motion design at Premier Studios on an Avid DS|HD for Dave Ramsey, John Deere, and Cessna; Barkley as a senior interactive designer and then "Chief Storyteller" doing pitch decks for the CCO; Sullivan Higdon & Sink running social for a portfolio of veterinary brands and eventually a Creative Technologist seat; Clickfarm as Interaction Design Director. Three years running Orange Flame Design, my own shop, then I went enterprise.
At Cerner I joined the UX Foundations team and helped build Terra — an open-source React component library that replaced an aging Bootstrap layer for the hundreds of product teams shipping Cerner Millennium. Eighty-plus components, accessibility audited with axe-core, Apache 2.0. When Oracle acquired Cerner in 2022, I moved into management. I led a distributed team through three phases: keeping Terra stable through the acquisition, building a Redwood-themed Terra as a unification stopgap, and rebuilding healthcare components from scratch on Oracle's Redwood design system for the next-generation EHR. Oracle Health laid me off in the infamous 5 a.m. 30,000-person email in March 2026.
The last year there I spent on RAG pipelines, vector stores, MCP servers, structured knowledge representation — the connective tissue between institutional knowledge and AI design tools. The tech is off-the-shelf. The hard part is getting judgment out of practitioners' heads and into a form a model can use without flattening it: intent, accessibility logic, the clinical safety reasoning that tells a designer when a combination of components is a malpractice suit waiting to happen. The Moonbird case study covers what we built; I'm still working on the underlying problem.
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.
Work with me
Open to full-time roles from Senior IC through Director, plus contract, fractional, and workshop engagements. Roles, contracts, and what fits is on the work-with-me page.