Dear Reader,
I am a designer, art director and a professional coach. I have been designing for the web for over 25 years, starting with making my own art projects and soon creating large-scale sites for major companies and nonprofits.
I loved running my own design studio, Manoverboard. I worked with a brilliant team and we won a ton of awards. When we were at the tippy top of our game, I sold my studio to a larger agency, Mangrove Web, in 2023. I now serve as fractional creative director there.
I still design. I create small, sustainable, beautiful websites for mission-driven organizations. I also help teams with design direction and typographic research.
Coaching for creatives — and other professionals
What I'm most excited about right now is coaching. As a new professional coach, I am focused on supporting emerging designers, creative leaders, and other professionals to navigate the immense cultural, social and economic changes we are undergoing. With experience in nearly every area of the design field – managing a studio and an agency, teaching design at university, and mentoring dozens of designers and developers – I bring compassion, calm and clarity to every coaching engagement.
How my coaching can help you
Coaching offers us the ability to dive into what you really want. Over the course of a few sessions, we co-create plans that are tailored around your goals, your ideas, your needs, your resources and your aspirations. Coaching is about empowerment. It is about catalyzing personal transformation. It is about shaping what a future could look like if we got out of the way.
The beauty of coaching, especially for designers, creative leaders and other professionals is that we come to realize this: not that something is possible but that you are possible. By working with me, we can spark learning, growing and building to create a life that you like.
I believe in the power of personal transformation, having experienced it myself again and again and again.
"You have to free your mind to do things you wouldn't think of doing. Don't ever say no."
— Carl Lewis
How my art direction can help you
I have designed and art directed hundreds of websites (and visual identities). I know how to run and manage project, large or small. I bring design teams together with curiosity and common purpose. And, having overseen a few hundred projects, I know how to anticipate what clients need from a creative, strategic and technical perspective.
My lens is primarily typographic. I actually read copy first and imagine into the design what and how it should read, look, feel and connect. I also take accessibility seriously. Most of the sites I've built are built to meeting accessibility guidelines to one extent or another. Finally, I am a reliable and empathic person. I bring to every client engagement my well-honed expertise, my penchant for honesty and my deep desire for clarity.
"90% of design is typography, and the other 90% is whitespace."
— Jeffrey Zeldman
How my newsletter can help you
My personal newsletter, Dear Designer, is a love letter to designers who are struggling, who are searching, who are seeking change – and those who still want to create something remarkable, new and different.
Each week, I write a personal post about design, the rise of AI, the realities and vicissitudes of being a designer, and how design is actually art.
My writing starts from a single vantage point: Designers are artists. We emerged 100 years ago from the rise of mechanical reproduction and the decline of the fine arts. Designers are essential to informing a social contract in which we everyone is be heard and everyone has a voice.
“The art of being wise is knowing what to overlook.”
— William James
If you need coaching, design, or art direction, please reach out to me. I'd be delighted to hear from you.
Looking forward,
P.S. If you want to read even more about me, I even have a handy-dandy bio page.
A brief note on AI
I sometimes use generative AI tools to assist me with research, ideation, and code — exploring topics, surfacing references, thinking through good ideas and bad, and building site features. Sometimes I use it to calm down my nerves.
The writing on this site, however, is my own. All newsletter posts and pages on this site are written by me, Andrew.
I do occasionally use AI for administrative tasks like drafting legal language. I review and edit all such output carefully before publishing or sending.
I have mixed feelings about all of this; hopefully, this site demonstrates my ambivalence about AI, automation, and the wilds of the social attention machine.
