Hello! I’m Ryan. 👋🏼

As a product designer, I’ve designed and evolved core experiences across the full surface of a consumer finance product: account onboarding, banking, investing, credit, money movement, referrals, and more. I helped GreenFi (formerly Aspiration) carve out an ownable position in the crowded fintech space by shaping and shipping innovative sustainable banking features such as tree-planting transaction roundups, automatic carbon offsets for fuel purchases, and climate-impact tracking. I’ve taken initiatives from early design ideation through QA and deployment, then maintained and evolved them as the products grew and changed.

On the design systems side, I’ve built and maintained component libraries, shaped and adapted UI patterns, and automated design token pipelines that keep UX, visuals, and brand voice cohesive across web and mobile platforms. I’ve carried a design system through multiple generations and two full rebrands, using that pipeline to distribute design-tokens-based theming out to every codebase from a single source.

I’ve worked in web, iOS, and Android codebases, including migrations like rebuilding an Angular app in React and converting iOS storyboards to SwiftUI. I’ve also contributed to marketing sites and brand overhauls, and managed both internal teams and external agencies.

I’ve adapted to a wide range of teams and leadership. Over my career I’ve experienced agencies, pre-launch startups, VC fundraising and hypergrowth, customer data migrations, internal reorgs, waterfall, agile… the works. I’ve reported to design, product, brand, engineering leaders, and executives, becoming a partner each of them could depend upon. When a buyout and mass layoffs hit the design team hard, I was the one kept on, trusted to pick up the workload and carry initiatives forward, supporting both marketing and product teams.

I spend a lot of time in both Figma and code, but I’m also down to jam out in a Google doc, spreadsheet, or slide deck. I treat frontend development as a design tool in its own right. I communicate clearly with engineers and can carry ideas a long way in code myself. Sometimes a working HTML demo or a draft API structure can surface a solution faster than a static mockup or Figma prototype.

I’m comfortable working solo, but I do my best work when I’m surrounded by caring, smart coworkers driving toward a shared goal. Working independently, I’m self-directed and own the work from start to finish. With a team, I collaborate closely with product managers, engineers, support, and other designers, and I focus on making the people around me as effective as possible: connecting them to context, surfacing the reasoning behind past decisions, and building the workflows and resources that help others do their best work.

I think polish is one of the most underrated ways to build trust in a brand or a product, and I find ways to include it without blowing up scope or timelines. I lean on design systems to codify it, so a consistently polished experience is guaranteed and made less of a burden on every project.

There’s a George Carlin joke, “Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?” It’s hard not to have similar feelings about AI. I see some folks offloading all of their thinking and creativity to AI tools and services. There are others who dismiss the value of AI entirely. I land somewhere in the middle. I treat LLMs like a powerful translation layer that can help me shape the ideas and vision I already have into working code and prototypes to be refined.

When it comes to building software, I use AI tools deliberately. I build skills, hooks, and other guardrails that keep their output reliable, and I develop workflows and patterns that make AI-related processes repeatable across a team. Used well, Claude & friends make me faster and free up time for the parts of the work that need real judgment or focused exploration and innovation.

Looking ahead, I think the future of AI is more than just smart chatbots and smarter search results. I see real potential for AI to let normal folks not only personalize the software they already use, but also build bespoke one-off tools to meet their individual needs.

I most recently got to experience the full roller coaster of startup life over the course of 11+ years building (and rebuilding) a sustainability-focused fintech. Prior to that, I served as the Lead Web Designer for a marketing agency, and the Director of Creative Initiatives for a non-profit organization.

I’ve also had the opportunity to spend time in other fun roles that aren’t quite as closely associated with my current career, such as: Videographer for countless events and projects, Front-of-House Audio Engineer for an outdoor community amphitheatre, Deck Hand on an actual steamboat, Barista at a coffee shop you’ve probably heard of, Singer and/or Guitarist in several bands you probably haven’t heard of, and most importantly, “the person my family calls when they have computer questions.”

When I’m not working, I spend a lot of my time hanging out with my family ♥ My wife Alyssa is also a talented product designer. We’ve got an adventurous toddler who is almost two years old, so he keeps us pretty busy. We also have a dog named Ellie — she’s a beagle-terrier mix, and she’s cooler than your dog (but your dog is still cool).

I enjoy playing music, casual gaming with friends, and burning through tokens on my personal Claude Code plan building little projects. I’m happy to go deep in discussions about Star Wars, and I have a collection of Apple product boxes that I’m definitely going to sort through any day now, I promise.