About

I live in Gatineau, Quebec with my incredibly multi-talented partner, Laura, and our ridiculous cats Ares and Onyx.

I have a BFA, major in design from Concordia University in Montreal. My background is in art and design.

Career

I’ve been working in tech as a designer and product manager (usually both at once) for over 13 years. In 2011 I co-founded Cumulonimbus with two friends, which dunked me head-first into the tech startup world. I served as app, web, and UX designer, web developer, product manager, and marketer, among other unnamed roles. We were given funding, mentorship, and a workspace from MaRS in their JOLT incubator program. We pitched our business in the GTA and the Valley, but no one was rushing to hand us money. I learned a whole lot about the startup world, then left the company, and Toronto, with pennies to my name in September 2014.

In November 2014 I joined Foko as a UX designer, in their first round of hires. They started as basically a private Instagram feed, but quickly found their niche in retail where the typical mode of communication and organization was still email and binders of paper printouts. Within the first 8 months of working there I became product manager, and remained the sole product manager for over 90% of my time there. I also remained the sole product designer until I hired my first direct report about 5 months before the company was bought out.

I worked closely with the CEO, dev management, and customer success to plot out the trajectory of the app. As I developed as a product manager, and gained the trust of the company, my decisions became more and more independent. I became not only the source of truth as the chronicler and caretaker of the service, but the source of decisions for much of the development.

While my title was product manager, I also lent my skills to the customer success and marketing teams, working on websites, imagery, motion graphics, and even some video production. We were a team of 20-30 people for the majority of the six and half years I worked there, and we were scrappy the whole time. I really embraced the startup work style, and wore as many hats as I could. We all learned a lot from each other, and many of us keep in touch to this day.

Foko was bought by WorkForce Software in 2021, taking most of the personnel with it. I moved into the main part of the company pretty quickly, acting as a go-between with Fokers to integrate Foko into the main product. I quickly and excitedly became part of the design crowd there, voluntarily participating in crits and helping to form a design committee of sorts. I stayed for a year before being laid off.

I moved on to Deeded, a real estate closing service and software company, and lead the production of their new SaaS offering. In the short time I was there I outlined and thoroughly documented a plan to create a whole new service, designed it from scratch, learned a whole lot about the process of closing a real-estate deal, and led my dev team through building the first large modules of the service.

I left Deeded in June 2023 and bootstrapped my own work on Runn8, a student athlete shuttle service, co-founded by a friend. Being the most technical person on the team, as well as the designer, and the one with the most startup experience, I designed and developed their website and web app, and consulted on the details of the service. This project is still ongoing.

Creating

I’ve been creating worlds since childhood. I’ve always had a vivid imagination and need many outlets for it.

Through my drive to make things I’ve amassed many a competency, and even lost a few. Among them I count: app design; web design and development; UX design and research; logo design and branding; graphic design and print production; illustration and painting; frame-by-frame animation; 3D modelling, animating, basic rigging, and rendering; video editing and motion graphics; amateur video game development; pixel art; comic creation; very amateur audio production; and even more amateur tattooing.

I’m always enthusiastic to learn more. I’ll undertake ambitious projects with needs beyond my immediate abilities as a way to brute force learn new skills and tools, and do so successfully. Being flexible and adaptable to a project is an important part of the way I work. I approach design work as an exercise in problem solving, with the process of solving being the most important, most satisfying part.

Lego

Besides drawing and painting, Lego was a significant part of my early development. Through years of playing with Lego I developed many skills and intuitions that I use to this day. Manipulating things in 3D space; conceiving a 3D structure and building it from the most basic elements; creating replicable components and textural themes; symmetry and asymmetry; colour schemes; consistency of design across multiple pieces; continuing and expanding themes based on someone else’s work.

Pixel Art

Once we got a family computer in the home (a 1994 IBM Aptiva, running Windows 3.1, with a Windows 95 upgrade disc, and OS/2 Warp) I started experimenting with pixel art, roughly copying Mario sprites in MS Paint off a paused game on the TV across the room. As I developed this new skill, I moved on from MS Paint to Paint Shop Pro, my favourite graphics tool for many years. I can’t help but recognize the similarities between pixel art and Lego building, with the limited colour palette, low resolution construction, and finite detail allowance of both.

Game Dev

My interest in pixel art coincided with my interest in making games. With new found access to the Internet, I discovered Flash and Klik games communities, the latter, at the time, almost entirely comprised of shoddy South Park platformers. After becoming obsessed with Klik games (and somehow not destroying my family’s computer with viruses) I received an imported copy of The Games Factory as a birthday gift one year. This precipitated years of working on (but hardly finishing) countless games with friends, first with my friend Josh a couple blocks away, then Adam in Australia who I met through a Klik game forum, and then with Chris Hanson aka Raincoatduck, who I met through Derek Yu’s long-defunct PixFu forum.

Chris and I formed Leaky Pig Productions and managed to release two games: Ninja Nuclear Defense, in which you play as a ninja janitor defending a nuclear power plant from attacking aliens; and Cruentus: Time Slayer, a Castlevania-inspired platformer where you control Cruentus, a timepire, who sucks time out of his enemies and can use it to power his special abilities, like double-jump or slowing time. Chris and I later collaborated with Derek on I’m O.K.: A Murder Simulator, a response to activist lawyer Jack Thompson’s A Modest Video Game Proposal.

Web Comics

While working on games, I also found myself drawn to an entirely different Internet community: web comics. This was the late 90s, web comics were one of the main things on the Internet! I’d always loved the weekend newspaper cartoon pages, so the free-wheelin’ Internet version of that was infinitely better. I gorged myself on as many comics as I could find, following links from one Keenspace comic to another, then ventured into the deeper reaches of the Internet to find even more indie comics.

One day Felan Parker, a member of the Blackeye Software forums (a precursor to the aforementioned PixFu forums), shared his web comic Nihilist Raisins. As I read through the archives realized I knew the name of the co-creator, Magill Foote. I went to highschool with that guy! So I got in touch, and did some really awful fan art, and then guest strips for NR, and then became part of the team.

A couple of years later I met Alex Charlton in CEGEP and we hit it off. He too, coincidentally, had a web comic with his friend Ronan Drysdale, The Dominos Online. After becoming fast friends, and recognizing that both of our comics had trouble updating regularly, we decided to combine forces, and include Laura, to make a six person mega team of comic creators. That was the birth of Nihilist Dominos. We effectively created a writer’s room out of a private forum (yes, a lot of my life revolved around forums for a good decade or so). We would pitch strip ideas to each other, punch them up and finalize them, then whoever had the time would dibs it for drawing. It worked surprisingly well for a while, we even had a backlog sometimes!

Animation

Of course, pixel art also introduced me to animation in a very clear and accessible way. Move this pixel in the next frame and it creates motion. I’d always loved watching animation, but being able to create that motion opened a magical new realm.

I tried my hand at Flash animation, which was all the rage at the time, but there was always a mental block of some sort there. Pixel animation was straight forward, but scaling that art up to screen resolution introduced so much complexity, let alone the far more complex controls of the Flash timeline.

In high school I attended a summer animation course at the Ottawa School of Art, in which we worked with a few different types of analog animation. Popsicle stick puppets, classic cell animation, and one day an introduction to 3D software, but no 3D animation project.

It seems the main thing I took from that was figuring out how to get my hands on 3D software. I found Blender soon after, and began a lifetime of tinkering with 3D. It took me a very long time before attempting to animate anything in 3D, though.

I did eventually get a handle on Flash animation and tinkered with it a bit before I was commissioned to make an animation for The Quarmby Lab at SFU. Heavily inspired by the mixed reality world of Gorillaz videos, I made a test video, got approval, and moved on to the full version. It was a ton of fun.

I go through waves of interest in animation, often around finding a new piece of technology or inspiration. For the past few years I’ve been doing Inktober, and have involved animation for the most recent rounds.

In 2022, a friend, Jared, wrote a mini story about a cat empress on the moon that felt like it needed to be animated. I made an animatic for it, along with a variety of sfx tests for a full animation.

Hoaxes

My tendency to create worlds also led me to build out a couple of hoaxes, or fabricated entities.

The first was Baby1, a post-punk band that existed in all but the music itself. This was an end of program, semester-long project for CEGEP. I designed album covers, wrote lyrics (with help), listed tour dates, took photos and made bios for each band member. I screen printed t-shirts and had pins made as merch! I got friends to contribute to a message board and create fan art for the band. I even created a TicketMaster ripoff to fake sell tickets to shows.

My crowning achievement with the project, besides a great grade, was fooling the local punk station long enough for them to find the hoax explanation page and e-mail me with their confusion and disappointment. They were looking for a local band to interview. I responded that I’d be happy to do the interview anyway, but I never heard back.

In university I tried my hand at the world of hoaxes again with Lorncot (an anagram of “control”), a pharmaceutical and biotech corporation developing nanobot technology. It used soothing wording and sleek Apple-style visuals to lull the viewer into a sense of ease with the sinister, invasive product. This was housed on lorncot.com (sadly offline and never captured by archive.org). I made another site decrying Lorncot and detailing conspiracy theories and lawsuits the corporation was embroiled in. This site was at truest-truth.com (which unfortunately suffered the same fate).

This was a much smaller project than Baby1, but the material could easily have made it a much, much larger project, and feels right at home in 2024 with Neuralink, AI generated everything, and a constant flood of conspiracy theories.

Tattooing

In the summer of 2022 I finally made it to the Dominican Republic with Laura to visit her family there. One of her cousins, Gianfranco, gifted me a tattoo machine after having it for a year and barely using it. I immediately sketched up a few ideas and ended up tattooing a little heart on my left ankle. I gave Laura the same tattoo a week or so later. She said it was the most painful tattoo she ever got. I’ve since done four more tattoos: a cute little ghost, a pile of cubes, a razor blade (later filled in black), and a series of Gengar smiles; all on legs.