About

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 in ad agencies. I started at Skyline Media Group as employee number three, making TV commercials in a converted Honda dealership backroom in Norman, Oklahoma. From there I was cutting on an Avid at Premier Studios for Dave Ramsey, John Deere, and Cessna.

Barkley hired me as a senior interactive designer and somewhere along the way started calling me “Chief Storyteller,” which mostly meant pitch decks for the CCO. Then a stable of veterinary brands at Sullivan Higdon & Sink, where I ran social and eventually landed a Creative Technologist seat, and a stretch running interaction design at Clickfarm.

Three years after that I ran my own shop, Orange Flame Design. Then I went enterprise.

At Cerner I joined the UX Foundations team and helped build Terra: a shared library of interface building blocks that replaced an aging patchwork for the hundreds of product teams shipping Cerner Millennium. Eighty-plus of them, all built to be accessible, all open-sourced. At Cerner, I moved into management a few months before the Oracle acquisition completed. 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 building the connective tissue between what a company knows and the AI tools its designers use. 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 case study on teaching AI a design system 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.