How did you discover your interest in digital design and develop your skills to enter the industry? I got into design by teaching myself through experimenting. I’ve always been driven by curiosity and by new technology, so a lot of my education came from opening tools, trying things, breaking things and figuring out what was possible.

I never really had this moment where I decided I’d become a very specific type of designer; it was much more organic than that. I was interested in visuals, interfaces, motion, 3-D and technology—anything that allowed me to make something I had in my head become real. Every time a new tool gave me access to something I couldn’t do before, I wanted to understand it.

That curiosity is still a huge part of the way I work today. I learn much better by making something than by studying a tool in isolation or following tutorials. Usually I’ll have an idea that is slightly beyond what I know how to do, and then I’ll learn whatever is necessary to make it happen. That process has taken me across product design, interaction design, motion, 3-D, prototyping and, more recently, much deeper into building products.

I also think being self-taught made me less attached to the boundaries between disciplines and let me find the right environment of people to learn from. I never saw a strong reason why a product designer shouldn’t understand animation or why someone designing an interface shouldn’t understand how it’s actually built. If learning something helps me make the final experience better, I’m interested in it.

Over time, that experimentation became experience. You start developing taste, learning which details actually matter, understanding what makes an interaction feel intuitive and realizing that the best solution is not always the most complicated one. But I still approach things with that same beginner curiosity. I think the moment I stop wanting to discover something new, I’ll probably become much less useful as a designer.

What do you currently do in your position as senior staff product designer of Squarespace? At Squarespace, a lot of my role involves thinking across a fairly large surface area rather than just owning an individual part of the product or isolated features. What interests me most is figuring out how creative tools can feel powerful without making people feel like they need to become experts before they can use them. Squarespace has an enormous range of customers—from someone building their first website to people who are extremely visually sophisticated—so there’s always this interesting tension between accessibility and creative control.

A big part of my work is exploring interaction models, visual systems and new product ideas; building high-fidelity prototypes; and trying to push an idea far enough that you can genuinely feel what the experience could become. I care a lot about fidelity during the design process—sometimes, a concept doesn’t really reveal whether it works until you can interact with something that behaves close to the final product.

I also enjoy projects where I can move beyond the traditional definition of product design and think about motion, spatial interactions, creative tooling or new ways of manipulating content. Those are usually the moments where I’m the most excited because you’re going beyond organizing information and creating a new behavior.

What I enjoy most about the job is probably that combination of scale and creativity. Small decisions can affect a huge number of people, but you still have opportunities to think very deeply about craft. It forces you to constantly ask whether something is genuinely useful, understandable and expressive at the same time.

What appealed to you about specializing in app design, and how have you seen your practice change as apps have been more widely adopted and diversified? I’ve always liked apps because there’s something very direct about them. You’re designing an object that someone carries with them, touches, manipulates and develops habits around. Mobile also creates really useful constraints: you have a relatively small screen, limited attention and people interacting in situations you can’t fully control. That forces you to prioritize. You have to decide what really deserves to be there.

At the same time, phones have become incredibly powerful. The idea of what constitutes a “mobile app” has changed dramatically. We went from relatively simple utilities to having cameras, GPUs, depth sensors, machine learning, sophisticated graphics APIs and desktop-class processing in your pocket. That creates a very interesting situation for designers because we can now build experiences that would have been completely unrealistic on a phone not that long ago.

My own practice has definitely become more technical as a result. I’m increasingly interested in what the hardware and software can actually do, rather than starting exclusively from established UI patterns. I’ll often look at a capability first and ask, “What becomes possible because this now exists?” When I prototype, I’m much more interested now in working with something real as early as possible. When you’re dealing with animation, 3-D, rendering, gestures or complex interactions, a static design file can only tell you so much.

I think apps are also becoming less visually standardized again, which is exciting to me. There was a period where a lot of products started to feel extremely similar. I’m interested in apps developing stronger personalities again and in interfaces becoming a more expressive part of the product instead of something that disappears completely.

Tell us about THR3EZY, your mobile template app for editing 3-D videos on your phone. What inspired you to develop this app? How does it work, and what was your design thinking behind its UI? THR3EZY started from a very simple frustration: I wanted to make more 3-D content, but the gap between having an idea and actually producing something felt much too large. Traditional 3-D software is incredibly powerful, but it requires time, a computer, a certain level of technical knowledge and, usually, a fairly deliberate workflow. At the other end of the spectrum, mobile template apps are very fast, but a lot of them flatten the creative process so much that you’re essentially swapping media inside something that has already been designed for you. I became obsessed with the idea of creating something in between those two worlds.

THR3EZY is basically a pocket 3-D motion graphics studio designed around templates. You can open a scene and replace media, but the template isn’t a flattened video. You’re actually opening the underlying 3-D composition. You can change the objects, materials, lighting environment, camera animation, typography, effects and animations, and completely take the scene apart if you want to. You can place your own images and videos directly onto 3-D objects, create groups and layouts, animate objects, move the camera through the scene, and then export the result as a vertical video or as a high-resolution snapshot.

The template part was important to THR3EZY’s design because I didn’t want the blank canvas to become another barrier. You should be able to open the app, choose something that already looks good, replace a few things and export it. But if you’re curious, you can keep going deeper. That principle shaped almost the entire UI: simple at the surface for templates, deeper underneath in projects.

One thing I was very conscious of was not making the interface feel like desktop 3-D software squeezed into an iPhone. I tried to organize controls around what people are actually trying to do instead of exposing every technical concept behind the scene graph or rendering engine. At the same time, I didn’t want to hide so much that the app became a toy, and I wanted the creative process to stay local and not depend on AI credits every time you want to make something.

We’re reaching a point where almost every new creative feature is being positioned through AI and credits, and often that means sending something to a server and consuming credits just to generate or process an output. We’re starting to overuse that model. AI is incredibly useful, but not every creative action needs to become an AI generation. With THR3EZY, the 3-D scenes, editing and rendering happen directly on the device. You can experiment, change things, render again, try another camera angle and create another version, and you’re not thinking about whether each attempt is costing you another set of credits. I want software that feels like a tool you own rather than a service you’re constantly asking permission from. Once you have the app and the device in your hand, you can just create.

This question was probably the hardest and most interesting design problem of the project: How do you let someone manipulate a genuinely three-dimensional environment with animation, cameras, materials and groups using a phone without overwhelming them, while still giving them enough freedom that the result feels genuinely theirs?

Building THR3EZY also changed me quite a lot as a designer because I built the entire app myself. I’m designing the interaction, writing and debugging the implementation, creating the 3-D assets and animating them, thinking about rendering performance, building the template system and the templates themselves, and then actually using the finished product to make content. That loop is incredibly addictive because there’s nowhere for an idea to hide: if something looks great in a mockup but performs terribly or is confusing once you touch it, you have to solve the actual problem. It has made me much more pragmatic, but strangely also more ambitious.

What have been some of your favorite projects that you’ve worked on at Squarespace? One of my favorite projects at Squarespace has been Blueprint AI. The idea behind it actually started years before generative AI became part of the conversation.

At the time, I was thinking a lot about the limitations of templates as a starting point. Templates are incredibly useful, but they’re still someone else’s answer to a problem. I wanted to explore a different kind of starting point, something that could understand what you were trying to make, your needs, your content and your visual taste. Then, it could help you construct a site around that. Instead of giving users 20 templates and forcing them to pick the template closest to what they envisioned, the question became: What if we could built the beginning of your website with you?

That concept eventually became much more possible as AI evolved, and seeing Blueprint AI become real has been particularly meaningful because the technology finally caught up with an idea I had been interested in for a long time. What I like about Blueprint AI now is that it changes the role of the system, It’s no longer only giving you tools or a finished template; it can help interpret your intent and create a starting point that feels much closer to you.

For me, that’s also an interesting direction for creative software in general. I don’t think AI is most interesting when it simply generates a finished answer. I’m much more interested in it as a way to remove the friction at the beginning of the creative process and give people something meaningful to react to.

Blueprint AI changed the way I think about what Squarespace can be because it pushes the product beyond the traditional idea of a website builder or template platform. It can help people translate something much more subjective—their taste, intention and personality—into an actual visual direction. That idea has influenced the way I think about THR3EZY too. I’m very interested in giving people a strong starting point without deciding the final outcome for them. The goal is to get people to the interesting decisions faster.

What excites you about interactive design right now? The distance between an idea and a working experience is collapsing. Designers can prototype things now that would previously have required an entire team before you could even know whether the idea felt good. You can work with 3-D, physics, live data, generative systems, spatial interfaces and increasingly intelligent behaviors much earlier in the creative process.

I think that’s going to make design stranger again, in a good way. We’ve spent years developing extremely mature patterns for apps and websites, which has been great for usability, but it has also created a lot of visual and behavioral “sameness.” I’m excited by the possibility of interfaces becoming more specific to the thing they’re enabling.

I’m especially interested in interactions where motion is not decoration but part of how you understand the system. Spatial interfaces are very good at this. When an object moves, changes depth or reacts physically, the interaction can communicate something without needing another label or menu.

I also think there’s something exciting happening around creative software becoming more playful. Serious tools don’t have to feel serious. Some of the most sophisticated creative processes are basically structured forms of play: move this, duplicate it, distort that, change the camera, try something weird and see what happens. I want more software to encourage that state.

What emerging technologies are going to have the most impact on how you design in the next few years? AI is obviously going to have an enormous impact, but I’m probably more interested in how it changes the process of building things than in simply adding an AI button to every interface.

The biggest shift for me personally has already been that I can move much closer to work with the engineering team than I could before. I can design an interaction and then immediately work through the implementation, debug it, change the architecture and iterate on it myself before sharing it with the team. That completely changes the relationship between design and development.

We’re going to see a lot more designers becoming capable of producing complete products or extremely sophisticated prototypes without waiting for the traditional handoff between disciplines. That doesn’t make engineering less important; in many ways, it makes understanding engineering even more important! But it changes who can participate in building. The same is happening with 3-D, animation and content creation. Technical barriers are disappearing very quickly.

I’m also interested in the combination of AI with spatial computing, computer vision and real-time graphics. Once software understands more about the environment, the content and the person interacting with it, interfaces don’t necessarily have to remain static collections of buttons—they can evolve to fit what you need. A website experience can be completely different from a user to another with AI by building variants of the same website. That way, everyone gets a personalized experience.

But I hope the future isn’t that everything becomes generated. There’s something valuable about intentionality and taste. If technology makes producing things dramatically easier, then deciding what is worth producing becomes much more important. One of the biggest changes will actually be the value of taste. Execution is becoming cheaper, but judgment is becoming more valuable.

Do you have any advice for designers just starting out in the industry today? Make things. That sounds almost too simple, but I really believe it. Especially now, there are very few reasons to wait for permission to explore an idea.

Don’t only make portfolio exercises. Make weird things. Make tiny apps. Make animations. Make a tool that solves something only you care about. Re-create an interaction you saw and want to understand. Learn enough code to break something. Try 3-D, even if you’re a graphic designer. Try more visual design even if you’re a traditional UX/UI product designer. Every new skill changes the way you see the skills you already have and the products you are building.

I’d also avoid becoming too obsessed with what a designer is “supposed” to do and to be. The industry loves creating categories—product designer, visual designer, motion designer, UX designer—but the reality is much less clean than that. Some of the most interesting work happens between those definitions. At the beginning of your career, curiosity is an enormous advantage. Follow it before you become overly concerned with specialization.

And develop taste. Look at things outside of product design. Architecture, furniture, fashion, photography, film titles, magazines, music videos, physical objects—anything! If your entire visual diet comes from other software products, your work will eventually look like other software products.

Finally, don’t confuse complexity with quality. Being able to make something complicated is useful. Knowing when the complicated thing should become simple is design. ca