About & how I work
What you say and how you say it.
Twenty years of learning (across brands, books, and software) that voice is vital and every word matters.
The arc
I started as a designer and frontend developer in 2006, fixating on fonts and endlessly rewriting placeholder copy to get it just right. Then I segued into brand strategy, helping companies figure out how they should sound, who they should speak to, and how to communicate that they’re worth a listen.
Then I became a publisher and author. I co-founded a small press, edited other people’s books, and wrote a stack of my own. From there, I committed myself to online publishing and podcast production, and years of daily writing for an audience that votes with its attention taught me how words actually land on the other end, and how to ensure I’m (more often than not) sending the right messages.
Now I build software, end to end, handling the brand, the naming, the interface, every word of copy, and the strategic direction.
I've had an unusual career, but these have never felt like separate disciplines to me. They’re the same question asked in different ways and answered with different inflections, across different mediums, and at different scales.
Many “design” problems, closely assessed, turn out to be unresolved decisions about what to say.
How I work
I treat copy as product design, not decoration applied at the end.
- Start from the job. Every label, button, and empty state is doing a specific job for a specific person. If I can’t name the job, the copy isn’t ready.
- Voice is an asset. What’s said and how it’s said can fundamentally shape the customer’s perception of the brand and its products, and should be treated accordingly.
- Systems over one-offs. A good voice must be developed so that it’s replicable and scalable, not a collection of ad hoc lines only I could write.
- Less of better. I’d rather ship fewer words that carry weight than more words that hedge, confound, or complicate.
I work comfortably alongside designers, PMs, execs, and engineers, and I’m just as happy owning a voice end to end as plugging into an existing content system and respecting its constraints.
Core skills
Some of the skills underpinning my work:
Availability
I’m open to UX writing and content design roles, and to adjacent work where the same skills apply: brand voice and verbal identity, naming, content and editorial strategy, product marketing, and defining how AI products speak. If the problem is fundamentally “what should this say, and how?”, I’d love to hear about it.