On Beginning

A welcome, an orientation.

There are a few ways to arrive at the work that ends up shaping you.
Some people choose it directly. Others move toward it slowly, orbiting the edges until the shape comes into focus.
I’m the latter.

My path has always moved through beauty—spaces, objects, art, the environments people build around themselves. For years, I lived inside that world from multiple angles: through EastCo, the Austin showroom I built, and through my own design practice. Those chapters ran in parallel, forming my eye, my instincts, my understanding of the emotional weight of this profession, and the realities of what it takes to run a creative business.

The shift revealed itself later, in another studio. I had been hired as a senior designer, but the work kept collapsing under the absence of structure. It became impossible to do the creative without first building the operational spine beneath it. My attention began to move— almost automatically—toward the systems and clarity the studio needed simply to stand. I stopped designing and began structuring, simply out of necessity.

That was the moment something in me clicked. I had shaped structure before—across years of my own practice—but doing it inside someone else’s studio, with her holding the creative lead, revealed a truth I hadn’t named: that I felt most myself in the architecture behind the work. There was a steadiness in supporting the work rather than steering it.

From that vantage point, the work looked different to me.

I began to see that the structure beneath a studio becomes the window through which the work is viewed—by the designer trying to hold the vision, and by the clients trying to understand it.
When the window is clean, the work is seen as true — its beauty legible, its honest intent clear.
When it’s clouded by confusion or disarray, even the most beautiful resolve is perceived through a distorted haze.

That recognition became the foundation of what I do now.

Today, I work with designers in a role that sits adjacent to the creative—close enough to understand and appreciate it, far enough to see its structure and shape.

Strategy, operations, language, boundaries, expectation-setting, leadership: the architecture that supports the visible work. My vantage point lets me see patterns that are hard to notice from inside a studio, and to build clarity that allows the creative side to move with more ease and intention.

Writing grew from that same place.
It offers a way to think through the profession’s unseen layers, to name the forces that shape the work, to explore what rarely enters the public story. And it gives the creative part of me a place to move again — a different medium, but the same impulse to articulate, to refine, to make meaning.

This space exists for the designers who live inside all of that complexity.
For those carrying both the magic and the weight.
For those who feel the depth of their work even when its public story feels too thin.

My hope is that it becomes a commons—a place to read, to reflect, to recognize yourself in the larger narrative of this profession. A place where the structure behind the work comes into view, and where the full story of the work can finally be seen.

Let’s begin.