Creative director and AI builder, in design and brand since 2008. I set the creative direction, design the brand and the product, and build the AI workflows that keep a team's output consistent with the brand. Most recently I designed the experience for The 1866 Studio, Huntington's AI-powered small business operating system.
I designed the experience for The 1866 Studio, Huntington's AI-powered small business operating system built with Google Cloud's Gemini: step by step guidance that takes an owner from idea to launch. A small, tight team, daily iteration, and a live prototype the whole team worked from.
idea → launch read the case studyDesign and art direction for the Team Huntington golf campaign, through to the email production that ships it. AI workflows that turn Figma designs into finished, accessible emails, taking turnaround from days to hours, with accessibility and compliance review intact. One organized library for 200+ marketing assets, so a distributed team ships from one system.
days → hours read the case studyOwned product design for an enterprise AI platform. Designed the onboarding flows and interaction patterns that took a new enterprise customer's first deployment from 2+ hours to under 30 minutes.
2h → 30min read the case studyPersonalized web experiences for healthcare professionals. 15% conversion lift through systematic testing.
+15% conversion read the case studyBrand, site, and booking flow for a local nutrition practice, built to run without a webmaster.
brand → live read the case studyCreative direction across brand, website, email and marketing, with an agency executing and ad spend under my control. I was the only designer, so I built it too: the brand identity, the design system, and an AI content workflow that took output from 4 to 12+ pieces a month.
3× output read the case studyFounded my studio. Brand identities, websites and design systems.
about →Personalized experiences for 30,000+ healthcare professionals. Conversion up 15%.
case study →An email design system of 50+ templates, adopted by teams that did not build it. Production time cut 30%.
a Huntington case study →Product design for an early enterprise AI platform. First deployment from 2+ hours to under 30 minutes.
case study →The only designer on a four-person team. An AI content workflow tripled output.
case study →Designed the experience for The 1866 Studio, an AI-powered small business operating system.
case study →DavidOS is the operating system I built for my own life. It runs my studio, keeps my family's calendar straight, tracks the goals I'm actually trying to hit, and handles the production work that used to eat my evenings, so one person can operate like a team.
Under the hood: 46 small AI agents, each with a written job description: what it may read, what it may write, what it must never do. Anything that leaves the machine waits for my approval. Anything that describes me has to cite a source. That's the part worth paying attention to. Not that AI does the work, but that it's built so I can trust what it does.
// what governed actually means, from this week's run logs
Every public artifact (portfolio, case study, bio) is blocked at export unless each claim traces to a dated source file. Audit result: PASS required.
Caught silently truncating 76% of its results while reporting success. Rebuilt to disclose every dropped item, with 39 regression tests. Silence is now a failure state.
Portfolio instrument that refuses to write its own report if the prose drifts into advice language. Refusal as a designed feature.
Caught a marketing metric my own website overstates. Flagged, held, and removed from every artifact until reconciled. Truth has a schema.
I'm David, a creative director and AI builder in Columbus, Ohio. Years of design and years of brand. I know when generic AI work creeps in and I kill it in its tracks. I define what the outputs look like because I am in direct control.
I lead creative for a brand or a product: I set the direction, do the design, and hold the quality bar. Give me your brand guidelines, lots of them. On day one I start turning them into workflows your AI tools build from, so the work comes out on brand. It keeps growing and anyone on the team can use it.
resume on request · remote-first from Columbus, Ohio
Brand identity and design systems. AI workflows for content and for turning designs into working pages, with a person reviewing before anything ships. Scoped projects, honest timelines.
engagements run through Skelton Media, my studio since 2008
hire meThree pieces to start with. Field notes, essays, case studies and process posts are all on the writing page.
The one rule under everything I build with AI. Generation is cheap, judgment is the product, and the judgment has to be deterministic.
7 min read
10-19
How to have AI think like a designer, lock in a vision, and hold it accountable to it. A free skill pack and the blueprint behind it.
5 min read
08-20
Being the only designer on a four-person team, collaborating on the codebase in Claude Code and GitHub, off a brand system built in Figma.
2 min read
