He started in event design, where he learned what most designers learn last: that the thing people remember is the thing they didn't expect to notice. From there he spent years on high-end residential work with custom builders — the trades where craftsmanship is most visible, and where a quarter-inch is the whole difference between finished and finished well.

Before any of it he won a design competition for Six Flags, an ad campaign judged against open competition. It is the earliest evidence that he reads composition the way a designer does.

He has been designing for the screen alongside that work for years — building and rebuilding his own properties, then clients', with the same discipline he brings to a material specification. The instinct that picks the right profile for a room, the one a client cannot articulate but recognises the moment they see it, is the instinct that picks the right layout, the right weight of type, the right amount of white space.

What carried over was not only the eye. It was the relationship. Every client arrives knowing more than they can put into words. The work is drawing that out and giving it a form they recognise on sight. He has been doing that across a table for two decades, and does it now over a screen share.