"Brandon is an amazing designer and a constant inspiration. Also he's a better cook than all of us.*"
— Bobby Flay (Good cook; terrible designer)
* At least that's what I think he said
WHO AM I?
Product designer with 14+ years of experience turning complex technical systems into clear, trustworthy products. I work across product strategy, interaction design, systems, and code—currently focused on AI-driven developer and infrastructure tools.
I’m at my best in ambiguous 0→1 environments, partnering closely with engineering and product leadership to define not just how a product looks, but how it should work.
Featured weekend project
Voxbit
An audio-visualizer playground. Five audio-reactive orb styles to tune, recolor, and export, plus waveform, bar, and meter companions. Everything runs locally in your browser.
— 01 / Highlighted Recent Work
Building a trusted, agentic Kubernetes management platform for air-gapped environments
Founding Product Designer
As Founding Product Designer, I lead product design and help shape product strategy for Thoras, an air-gapped Kubernetes management platform for SRE teams. I established the product design practice and partner with engineering and executive leadership to turn complex infrastructure challenges into trustworthy workflows for observability, cost optimization, and operational insight. I’m now leading the definition of our emerging agentic experience—driving cross-functional decisions around technical requirements, system capabilities, and roadmap priorities. My first redesign of the beta increased demo conversions by 300%.
Reducing time-to-deployment for policy enforcement models from weeks to days
Lead Product Designer, Project Co-Lead
Co-lead the development of an internal model development tool for policy enforcement for the Ads Privacy & Safety team. Established new workflows for users to leverage AI to create and review golden sets that reduced the average time-to-deployment from ~3 weeks to ~2–3 days.
Additional highlights
I also redesigned the logo for an existing tool (EWOQ), created the logo for a new tool (AIS), and developed a prototype for a "flashy" advertiser source visualizer to be used for various promotional opportunities.
— 02 / How I Work
Make the complex legible
I work on technical products where users need to understand what a system is doing, why it matters, and what to do next.
Prototype to think
I use Figma, code, and AI-assisted tools to make ideas tangible early—especially when the interaction model isn’t obvious yet.
Work beyond the screen
I partner closely with engineering and leadership on product models, technical constraints, roadmap decisions, and the systems behind the interface.
— 03 / Career History
| Date | Company | Role |
|---|---|---|
| 2025– | Thoras.AI | Founding Product Designer Current |
| 2023–2025 | Senior Product Designer, Ads Privacy & Safety (Embedded Consultant) | |
| 2022–2023 | Upstart | Senior Product Designer, Design Systems |
| 2021–2022 | HackerOne | Senior Product Designer |
| 2017–2021 | Gartner | Senior UX/UI Designer & Design Team Lead |
| 2014–2017 | Booz Allen Hamilton | UX/UI Designer |
| 2012–2014 | Thermopylae Sciences + Technology | UX/UI Designer |
— 04 / Earlier work
HackerOne Design System (H1/U1)
Building a design system—and a culture of accessibility—from the ground up, going from zero to 100% squad adoption.
Project Lead, Lead Designer
Capterra Shortlist
Turning reports that took hundreds of manual hours into automated, always-current reports for 500+ software categories—converting even better than the ones they replaced.
Project Lead, Lead Designer
— 05 / Weekend Vibing
Select side projects and experiments I play around with on the weekends. More to come.
Voxbit
An audio-visualizer playground—audio-reactive orbs in pixel, particle, aurora, voxel, and cyberpunk styles, with waveform, bar, and meter companions. Runs entirely in your browser.
Intervals
A dependency-free library of loading states—dots, bars, pixels, and progress—with a workbench for tuning each one and exporting it as a standalone SVG.
Fretform
An interactive 24-fret scale atlas for exploring tunings, hearing scales and chords, and seeing how every note maps across the neck.
— 06 / Motion Graphics
Capterra logo
I love motion graphics but don't get to do as much as I'd like. Instead of dumping a bunch of examples, here's an animation of the Capterra logo I made
— 07 / Writing
AI in Product Design Concepts: A Primer on Deterministic vs Probabilistic Systems
AI and machine learning are reshaping user experiences in unprecedented ways. Understanding these foundational design approaches is crucial when creating new experiences for your users.
UX Bootcamp, UX Collective
Consensus building in a digital first world—for design systems and beyond
How to maximize asynchronous collaboration while building a design system and go beyond the comment tool in Figma
UX Bootcamp, UX Collective
— 08 / Figma Freebie
Spec helpers for Design Handoff
Customizable spec components for more consistent and effective design handoff
— 09 / Kind words
""Brandon joined our team as the sole Product Designer dedicated to our Design System in order to refine and grow the new system. I was impressed with how quickly he got to know the team and problems. He took initiative to get to know all the Product Designers and set up a repeatable survey to benchmark our Design System. He used innovative methods to drive consensus among the design team and get buy-in for changes. He also became close with the engineers quickly, in part due to his technical knowledge and in part due to his excellent sense of humor. Brandon was an asset to our Design System and I wish he could still be part of our team."
Karina Nivet
Former Head of UX, Upstart
^ Karina is the best and I would happily work together again someday.