Hi, I'm David — a UX designer who got here the long way.

I'm a UX product designer based in Mesa, AZ. I just graduated from ASU's Herberger Institute with an MS in UX (Spring 2026), and I came to this discipline the long way around.

I started in fine art — photography, 3D modeling, and video production. They taught me how to look closely and build a frame around someone's attention, but I kept circling the same question: how does art actually reachpeople? Practical art, the kind that earns its place in someone's day, has to be functional — it has to serve more than the person who made it.

That question pushed me into marketing and social media design — design as a way to reach an audience instead of waiting for one to find me. But the audience that mattered most to me was still bigger than what marketing could reach. I figured out, somewhere along the way, that the discipline that touches the most lives is the one shaping the products people open every day. So I went back to school for UX.

Now I take native Mac and mobile apps from research to App Store. I design every product decision myself; when there's no engineer in the loop, I treat AI as a stand-in pair — useful, but the kind of tool I'd hand the keyboard back to a real engineer for in a heartbeat. WikiClaw, the case study I'm proudest of, is a Mac app I designed end-to-end and shipped to the App Store under exactly that setup.

Before grad school, I worked in marketing and social media design.

Off the clock, I 3D-print things I don't need, lose evenings to video games, and share a desk with a cat who has very firm opinions about which chair is hers.

MY VALUES