A few turns along the way

I’ve worn a lot of hats throughout my career: graphic designer, freelancer, creative director, developer, agency owner, and now founder of a small venture studio. My path has been a tad unorthodox, but each turn has given me something I still use.

After graduating from SCAD in 2015, I worked through a series of corporate and agency assignments in New York and New Jersey, many through Robert Half / The Creative Group. One week I might be picking up an unfamiliar brand system; another, preparing packaging for production. Working with organizations like Verizon, Quidsi, and EngenderHealth taught me to pay attention to the details and get up to speed quickly.

I enjoyed the work, but I couldn’t shake the idea of traveling while working remotely. In late 2016, I started freelancing independently and booked a one-way flight to Spain. Over the next few years, I worked with more than 100 clients across six continents. I learned how to ask better questions, communicate across time zones, and keep a project moving without everyone in the same room.

Back in Savannah, I joined Candor, a healthcare software startup, as one of its first 10 employees. As Creative Director, I worked across brand, product, marketing, and sales. I also built WordPress Multisite infrastructure for more than 20 subsidiary brands and websites. With a small team, the number of hats I wore grew pretty quickly. I found that I liked having a hand in how the business worked, too.

I went on to found Anchor Point Collective, where I worked with a venture studio to launch brands and early products. That meant working through an idea with a founder, making the brand, building the site, and coordinating the people needed to get it out the door.

At tea.xyz, I was another first-10 hire. I designed, developed, and deployed the company’s first two marketing sites with Hugo, leaving the product engineers more room to focus on the product. My coding had started with a bit of HTML and CSS dabbling; this was where it became a much larger part of my work. I also collaborated with the product and engineering teams on the tea GUI and led creative operations during a busy period of growth.

Through Tom Smith Design, I’ve since embedded with marketing teams at Total Synergy and The Action Company. There’s plenty of hands-on design in that work, but I also build the templates, libraries, and tools that help the rest of the team produce good work themselves.

In 2026, I started Hatrack Digital here in Maine to develop and test some ideas of my own. Working on a ghost tour, a social story editor, and an online gallery has a way of making you care about all the things around the design: how someone finds it, understands it, uses it, and decides whether to come back.

You can read my experience timeline, browse selected work, or see more visual work in my design portfolio.

I like being close enough to the work to understand where things get stuck. Sometimes that means making the design myself. Sometimes it means giving someone else a better starting point: a template, a component library, or a small tool that saves them from repeating the same task.

I’ve worked with large organizations and very small teams. Both have useful habits, but a process that makes sense for one can tie the other in knots. I try to keep the amount of process proportional to the problem.