Artist & Designer.
- Most Used Software:
- Sketch, Affinity Designer, Cinema 4D, Nova, Lightroom
- Current Work Setup:
- 16" M1 Max Macbook Pro, Pro Display XDR, Alienware Aurora R10 (Ryzen 5950X, GeForce RTX 3090)
As a child, I wanted to become a professional baseball player. Sports was my life. But I also loved being creative. I loved building my own ideas out of Legos and sketching elaborate mazes on paper. As I got older, I became hugely fascinated in reading manga and watching anime around sixth or seventh grade and naturally I wanted to draw characters in that style. By the time I was in high school I was creating my own character designs and continued to sketch throughout college. I really wanted to become an illustrator, but when it was time to pick a major, I just felt my skill level just wasn’t where I wanted it to be at that point. I definitely wanted to do something in the art field, but something that would give me a much safer chance at having a successful career in. The answer was 3D modeling and animation. I was so set on going to Academy of Art college in San Francisco, especially after the tour of the school. But the insane cost of tuition scared me and so I ended up choosing my backup and study Graphic Design at Cal State University at Long Beach. While identity and print design was the main focus of this program, I became heavily interested in web design and spent most of my time outside of school learning to build websites while learning design fundamentals in school.
Building websites was so exciting for me I ended up dropping out of school and getting a job as a junior web designer at a small company in Los Angeles. As my experience grew, I hopped around to a few more companies while freelancing on the side until I landed a job as a UI Designer at Oakley, Inc. in 2006.
My primary job there was designing product pages, building out a design system, and writing html/css. While at Oakley, I had developed a huge fascination in designing software and icons for the Mac because of inspiration from companies like Panic, Delicious Monster, and designers like Max Rudberg, Mike Matas, and others from the days of Macthemes.net. This was also around when the iPhone was first introduced. Because I was already tinkering with designing icons and Mac OS themes, I was tasked with designing one of Oakley’s first iPhone apps. I also met Paul at Oakley and we joined forces to create an iPhone app for fun outside of work. Our app, Weightbot, was such a success that we created Convertbot which also became a big hit. When we started working on our third app, Pastebot, we decided it was time to take the leap and go full time creating apps. We’ve been doing it since 2008 and it has been a wild ride ever since.
- tapbots.com Software company I co-founded and design for.
- radiantmars.com Some of my design work and illustrations.
- stickershift.com Automotive sticker pack I designed for iOS.
- Currently Learning:
- 3D Modeling + Rendering