How did you discover your interest in a creative career and learn the skills to enter the industry? My interest in a creative career began taking shape in high school—though it was a somewhat stunted start, which I’ll get to shortly. My school had a screenprinting department that made posters, flyers and apparel for the school. It was an elective, and I signed up. Burning plates, washing screens, making tintypes and getting all inky made my heart throb. Photoshop CS2 was so scary. The Pen tool? Dodge what? Burn it? I loved it all. Having access to all that equipment made the blank pixel grid canvas seem more like a brief du jour—usually, it went something like: “What skateboarding brand logo can I mess with today, burn into a screen and print on a hoodie or T-shirt?” Ask my mom. 

That carried on for the last two years of high school, ruining clothing and learning the plastic arts. I went to college first at Penn State University of Communications, or something like that. I didn’t love it. So, mid-semester, I transferred to Temple University’s School of Communications in Philadelphia. 

This is where we come back to the stunted start. After transferring and landing in Peabody Dormitory (rest in peace), I realized I’d discovered my passion too late. That dormitory housed mostly students in Temple’s prestigious Tyler School of Art. Within Tyler, there were specific tracks like graphic design, glassblowing, painting, jewelry design and CAD. I felt inferior, but the friends I made there gave me a real-time, behind-the-scenes glimpse into the work they were doing. I’d be totally lying if I said I double majored by living with graphic designers and copying their curriculum. However, I double majored, so let me romanticize it.

What led you to cofound your New York–based creative studio View Source with Ross Vandenhoeck and Jen Yuan? I met Jen at New York–based real estate agency Compass, where I had been working as a design lead for several years. Jen was the first developer I had ever worked with that understood design and motion and actually put it to work. Most other developers produced a product that required me to sit down with them and pair program the hell out of it to ensure that it actually looked like the design it was meant to be. Ross was a roommate of Jen’s at the time, and we just made it happen. There are some bits and pieces of the story left out for no good reason. Write to me or come by for a coffee, and I’ll share them. Spoiler alert: it’s not actually interesting. We’re partners, and we raise each other up daily.

As partner of design, what does your role entail, and what does your day to day look like at your studio? These days, my focus is almost entirely on people. For the first four or five years of View Source—we’re going to be at about year seven when this article gets published—I spent the majority of my day split between designing and showing clients that the design was right for their brief. Today, my role is about making sure everyone here is raising the effectiveness of the group, has an admiration for the people around them and feels that their time is being spent in the best possible way. To support that, I sit in on concept meetings and have one-on-ones with everyone on the design team—mostly to listen. The other people I focus on are our clients; they often come to me to talk through what they hope to achieve, and my job is to make that hope visible through the work our team creates.

Tell us about your identity and website for Bandit, a Brooklyn-based running gear brand. How is View Source continuing to support the brand ecosystem? The identity for Bandit remains authentic to the New York running scene, yet it’s always evolving alongside the broader world of running. It looked strong in our presentations back in 2021, but it’s even more powerful now, recognized by millions. That recognition came from thoughtful design initially and as the Bandit team grew with their ambitions over time.

For a few years, we weren’t quite on Bandit’s level of growth—but now, in 2026, we’re catching up, in part thanks to the team. They’ve sent us more referrals than anyone we’ve ever worked with, and yet Bandit remains our closest partner. We support the company in any way it needs—seriously. Day to day, that includes UI design, graphic design, campaign conceptual support, motion design, UX design and development.

What was it like working on the redesign of Pantone’s app Pantone Connect? What was the purpose of the redesign, and what features did you help implement? It was a long and involved process that required months of immersion and wireframing for each feature we were building. Think of each feature like an application within an application. Pantone Connect has four main features, and each one took about three months to design from start to finish, often working in parallel and sharing similar UI components along the way. 

The purpose of the redesign was to enhance the app’s usability and functionality in response to feedback from the design community. We collaborated with Pantone on the complete UX and UI design overhaul of Pantone Connect. The Pick, Extract, Convert and Measure tools were all reimagined. At the end of the day, they are all different ways to achieve the same goal: helping a designer somewhere in the world visualize and build a palette—or multiple palettes—for a project, using colors from a specific Pantone library. That’s what the tool is designed to do. The new experience elevates usability, inspiration and collaboration, repositioning Connect as both a precision color tool and a forward-looking design platform.

Besides the two projects mentioned above, what have been some other favorite projects that you’ve created at View Source? How have these changed your perception of what you can accomplish through design? The design of the SQIRL website was a favorite of mine because we accomplished a really liberal design that some clients would say abso-fuckin-lutely no to. It’s a design that challenges the viewer. My mother would say that it looks bad. However, for us, it’s a design taking part in the critique of the commercial graphic world that started back at the Rietveld Academie and Werkplaats Typograpfie schools in the Netherlands. 

Now, you might think that sounds a little bit fetishistic for a creative director and designer to say. You would be right. Nonetheless, it’s a fun site even if it’s not for everyone. Once you get past the initial aesthetics of it, you realize it packs a ton of functionality and a lot of delight that compounds with its usage. It’s shareable. Isn’t that what we want? 

When you’re designing a website with an e-commerce component to it, and it doesn’t have to make the owner millions in online sales and raise the average-order value to meet a yearly customer lifetime value KPI, there is room to send it off into the realm of something more interesting and less focused on conversion.

How does your team structure of both developers and brand designers collaborate to blend digital performance with soul? Our team doesn’t really fight with one another in the ways I’ve seen “separate departments” clash in other agencies. We operate on a foundation of a lot of trust. When we come together to review work, everyone knows where the bar is, which lets us change direction faster with less internal defensiveness slowing us down. 

Then there’s the hybrid nature of our collaboration: brand designers, strategists and engineers working together. It’s a balance between mathematical truth and human truth, and that tension is where the most interesting work happens.

Do you have any advice for creatives starting out in the field today? Have some jealousy. Don’t ignore your jealousy of those above you. Set your ambitions high and be jealous of those that have come before you and are currently outpacing you. That’s one way you’ll run faster, learn more and become more experienced. Don’t pretend you’re not jealous. Jealousy proves your passion which is a necessary trait behind the driven. It’s a state of unity between your experience, your self-concept and your behavior. ca