"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?
14+ years experience as a multi-disciplined product designer and experienced design leader. I'm passionate about creating effective, intuitive designs with an emphasis on accessibility.
My experience with front end development enables more effective communication and collaboration with engineering while ensuring the user experience is prioritized.
— 01 / Career History
| Date | Company | Role |
|---|---|---|
| 2025– | Thoras.AI | Founding Product Designer Current |
| 2023–2025 | Senior Product Designer, Ads Privacy & Safety (Consultant) | |
| 2022–2023 | Upstart | Senior Product Designer, Design Systems |
| 2021–2022 | HackerOne | Senior Product Designer |
| 2017–2021 | Capterra (Gartner) | Senior UX/UI Designer & UI Team Lead |
| 2014–2017 | Booz Allen Hamilton | UX/UI Designer |
| 2012–2014 | Thermopylae Sciences + Technology | UX/UI Designer |
— 02 / Highlighted Recent Work
Building a ML-driven, predictive kubernetes management tool users can trust
Founding Product Designer
Lead the product design and development for a complex, air-gapped kubernetes management tool. Started by establishing trust and credibility with our SRE users. We then focused our efforts on proving ROI, general observability, and uncovering hidden insights. First redesign of the beta lead to a 300% increase in demo conversions. In addition to establishing the core product design process and culture, I worked with executive leadership to lead the overall strategy and product roadmap.
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.
— 03 / 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
— 04 / 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
— 05 / 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
— 06 / Figma Freebie
Spec helpers for Design Handoff
Customizable spec components for more consistent and effective design handoff
— 07 / 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.