I’m Jon, a hands-on design leader focused on making things people actually use.

Life-long builder of inclusive design teams, while evolving process to enhance productivity and shaping strategies that help companies scale.

Latest Experiences

After growing my career through building and leading teams, my current role at Dribbble has been a welcome change of pace—collaborating again with former Pond5 colleagues and stepping back into the details as the senior-most IC.

CURRENT
Dribbble / Principal Designer

PREVIOUS
Upside / Sr. Director, Design
Minerva / Director, Design
MSG Company / Director, UX
Pond5 / Director, Design + Creative
Shutterstock / Director, Design

Dribbble

Marketplace pivot to $10m+ GMV in 18 months

(Coming Soon)

Upside

Becoming the #1 travel app through design transformation

Madison Square Garden

Pond5

$250m exit by reinvisioning a two-sided marketplace for artists.

Leading Principles

These are some of the guidelines I use when establishing frameworks towards craft, rigor, and culture.

  • Harness a blend of data, customer insights, interviews, testing, and intuition to drive informed choices. Understand your audience intimately to craft products that resonate, prove valuable, and inspire genuine affection.

    Transform ambiguity into lucidity through effective communication.

  • Continuously elevate and refine craft to harness creativity, consistency, and attention to detail.

    Mitigate risk and ensure the delivery of the optimal solution through rigorous process of understanding, communicating, aligning, documenting, testing, and validating.

  • Embrace empathy in all interactions, recognizing its impact in collaboration. Provide mentorship for career growth, balancing product development and well-being.

    Remove obstacles, enabling unhindered progress.

Bootstrap to Fortune 50

I've had the privilege of working with some of the sharpest minds across industries including entertainment, media, technology, finance, and healthcare, spanning both B2C and B2B business models.

Feedback & Mentorship

Need help transitioning from IC to manager or feedback on your portfolio? Book some time with me, I’ve spent hundreds of hours mentoring some of the top designers across the globe.

Design Thinking

A collection of some of the ways I think about design and how I apply my thinking to my process and work acumen.

Management Design: 101

Painful Design Truths