Writing before pixels

The meeting was fifteen minutes. The part I remember is not the meeting. It is the silence after, and the strange business of taking off armor when there is no longer anything to fight. I had the DarkStar taken apart on my desk from the night before, and I remember thinking that it was a good sign I still wanted to put it back together.

For almost three years I was a Course Director at Full Sail, teaching Applied HCI and UX to people who were a few months from doing this work for money. In August the role ended. This is not a piece about that decision. Higher ed in 2026 is contracting and I could see the shape of it from where I sat. It is a piece about what I found when I had to point twenty-five years of work at a blank page and say what it was.

What surprised me

I expected the teaching years to be the problem. On a resume they look like a detour: EA, STATS, FanDuel, a startup I co-founded, a VP title, and then a classroom. I assumed I would have to explain the classroom away.

Here is the part the resume does not say. My mother was an educator for more than fifty years. She had ALS at the end, and I was her caregiver through it. She was the kind of teacher former students still write to, which I did not fully understand until I got a few of those letters myself. For most of my career people had told me the same thing in different ways, that whatever I was good at, I was better at it when I was showing someone else. I did not do much with that until she was gone. Then it stopped sounding like a compliment and started sounding like an instruction. I went into teaching to pay forward what twenty years of studios had given me, and to keep something of hers going a little longer. That was the reason. Not a pause, not a soft landing. A choice.

So when the role ended, the loss was not the job. It was the thing the job had been standing in for.

The first thing I did was write a positioning statement, two sentences, three audiences. It took most of a day. What came out was not a designer who had paused to teach. It was someone who had spent years watching people learn the craft, which meant I could finally say why the craft works, out loud, in order. The classroom was not the gap. It was the part that made the rest legible.

And the reason I went in has not ended with the contract. Mentoring does not need a title. It needs a room, and there are more of those than I was counting.

I did not know most of this until I tried to write it down. That is the whole lesson, really. You do not know what you have until you have to describe it to someone who was not there.

The first mistake

Week one I opened the old portfolio and started patching it. Fixed the type, pulled some of the gamification concepts back, rebuilt a page that had never worked. Two days of that before I admitted I had no idea what the site was supposed to say. I had been treating it as a thing to repair rather than a thing to decide, and there is no amount of layout work that gets you to a point of view. The case studies did not exist yet. I was polishing the container for copy I had not written.

Where the work went

So I treated myself as the product. Not as a metaphor. Literally the same process.

The case studies were written in full, problem through outcome, before a single screen was placed, and every claim in them was checked against what I actually did versus what the team did. The guardrail on that one is simple. If I cannot say I owned it alone, the sentence says "we." The site copy came next, positioning first, because a page cannot be laid out until it knows what it is arguing. Only then did the portfolio get a design system: one accent, one type pairing, one grid, one reveal per page.

None of this is clever. It is the work I would do for a client, done for a client who happens to be me and who is, for once, available for every review.

The case studies on this site are the result. They took longer than I wanted, which is what happens when the writing is the actual work and the layout was never the hard part.

What is still unresolved

I am writing this from inside the search, not after it, which is the only honest place to write it from. The site is live this week. The resumes are done. The applications are just starting. I do not have an answer yet about where this lands, whether it is a senior IC seat, a leadership role, or client work through the studio, and I am not going to pretend the uncertainty is comfortable. It is not.

What I have instead is a rhythm. Mornings are applications and follow-ups. Middays are the next case study. Late afternoons are people, which matters more than any of the rest. And the printer is usually running in the background, which is its own kind of reassurance: something is being made, whether or not anyone has hired me to make it yet.