gmdw

Work

I've had the privilege of spending twenty years designing products people use, from first prototype through testing and launch. I started with Flash-era co-ops in Cincinnati and New York, spent six years in the Bay Area at frog, Punchcut and Snapguide, and since 2012 I've been back home in Cincinnati at Roadtrippers, Evidation and my own studio, AUGUR Design.

Cincinnati, 2012 – now

AUGUR Design, 2023 – now

Principal product designer · Aug 2023 – now · Cincinnati

Running my own studio full-time again. I design connected products for manufacturers, often in partnership with the studio Holografik, and consult on AI workflows. Alongside client work I design and build my own lab projects and develop my own perspectives on AI-assisted product development.

Evidation

Product Designer → Senior Product Designer · Apr 2019 – Jul 2023 · Remote

Evidation's app rewards people for healthy habits and invites them into health research studies. I joined full-time after contracting with the team since 2017, and designed for three audiences: members, research participants, and the pharma and medical customers running studies.

AUGUR Design, 2017 – 2019

Principal product designer · Apr 2017 – Apr 2019 · Cincinnati

Contracting full-time under a new name: Later Nerdz became AUGUR Design in 2017. My Evidation contract began that August and led to a full-time role there.

Roadtrippers

Lead Product Designer · Sep 2014 – Apr 2017 · Cincinnati

Roadtrippers helps people plan road trips and find places to stop along the way. As the only designer, I owned the product across iPhone, Android, web and mobile web, and led a redesign of every core feature from concept to launch with the founder, product and engineering. The redesign at least doubled daily active users and solidified the app's place in the Top 100 travel apps on iPhone.

Later Nerdz, 2012 – 2014

Principal product designer · 2012 – 2014 · Cincinnati

After moving back to Cincinnati I contracted full-time through my own studio, Later Nerdz, which later became AUGUR Design. I focused on winning direct clients and going deep on Sketch, then the new standard design tool. A highlight was Bay Area FasTrak: designing how drivers buy, manage and pay for automatic toll tags, and pushing for focus and clarity in a technology new to most people.

Bay Area, 2006 – 2012

Snapguide

Interaction Designer · Aug 2011 – 2012 · San Francisco

Snapguide was a mobile-first UGC platform for creating and sharing how-to guides. The founders recruited me with a cold LinkedIn message, and I joined as the second hire, after the first engineer. I brought design consultancy practice into a startup while keeping pace with engineering: I defined user segments, recruited test users, built wireframe prototypes and ran testing. Ahead of launch I worked directly with Apple on promotional materials, and Snapguide launched in 2012 as Apple's iPhone App of the Week. Within a year it passed 1M monthly users, and by late 2013 it had 2M monthly users and 50,000 to 60,000 user-generated guides. Brit + Co acquired it in 2015.

Press

Punchcut

Senior Interaction Designer · Apr 2010 – Aug 2011 · San Francisco

Punchcut is a user interface design and innovation company specializing in mobile and connected products and services across devices, working for the world's biggest device makers, carriers and consumer brands. I designed consumer software built on an idea that was new at the time: start something on one device and continue it on another, like "throwing" a song from a phone to the TV. The work came before reliable Bluetooth, NFC and proximity, and before persistent cloud data was a given.

Also: a global entertainment company, a search and software giant, US and Korean wireless carriers, a smartphone maker and a magazine publisher.

Odopod

Interaction Designer · Sep 2009 – Mar 2010 · San Francisco

Odopod was a San Francisco digital marketing agency. I brought frog's product design process with me and, with a small team, designed, prototyped and user-tested an early mobile group messaging platform. I also explored some of the first social features for a national sports network's website.

frog design

Visual Designer → Design Analyst II · Jun 2006 – Sep 2009 · Palo Alto, then San Francisco

I started as a visual design contractor on a trial basis, was hired full-time after three months, and later moved to the San Francisco office. The work was early strategy and concept work for executives at global brands: first UI for screens from 3 inches to 10 feet as a Visual Designer, then product concept and strategy as a Design Analyst from 2008. frog also introduced me to a network of remarkable people and ideas.

Independent projects

Freelance · 2006 – 2012 · San Francisco

A handful of freelance projects alongside full-time work.

School and co-ops, through 2006

University of Cincinnati, DAAP

B.S. in Design, Digital Design · 2006 · Cincinnati

College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning, and a member of AIGA. My capstone was user research on live session recording and heatmap analytics for improving websites, run on a capture stack I built myself in Flash and PHP.

HGK Basel, Visual Communication

Experimental Interaction Design · 2005 · Basel, Switzerland

A week-long international design intensive, living and working alongside senior faculty at the Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst Basel. I brought deep ActionScript experience and built a series of interactive motion studies, critiqued by the group and HGK professors.

Big Spaceship

Design co-op · 2003 – 2005, three terms · New York

Designed and built major motion picture and lifestyle marketing sites, covering UI and game design, production, programming, 3D modeling and animation.

DigitalThink

Design co-op · 2002 · Cincinnati

Custom e-learning for Fortune 1000 clients. I designed and built advanced interactive work in Flash and ActionScript, pushing what the technology could do at the time.

Updated November 2026.