Why I design before I write a line of code
Most products break at the seam between design and engineering. Here's how owning both ends removes that seam entirely.
There's a moment on almost every project where design meets engineering and something gets lost. A spacing rule that "wasn't in the spec." An interaction that felt obvious in Figma but is awkward in the browser. An edge case the designer never saw and the developer never asked about.
That seam is where products quietly get worse.
I learned to design and to build, and over time I stopped treating them as two jobs. When the same person holds the vision from the first frame to the deployed app, the seam disappears. There's no handoff to lose information across.
Design is where I think
I design first not because it's prettier, but because it's the cheapest place to be wrong. Moving a button in Figma costs seconds. Moving it after the API, the state, and three components depend on it costs an afternoon.
So I spend real time on flows and wireframes before I touch a high-fidelity screen — mapping what the user is actually trying to do, not what looks good in a portfolio shot. By the time I open the code editor, the hard decisions are already made.
Code is where I find out I was wrong
Design is a hypothesis. The browser is the test. Things that felt smooth as static frames reveal their friction the moment they're real — a form that's a step too long, a transition that fights the content, a layout that collapses on a phone.
Because I build what I design, that feedback loop is instant. I don't file a ticket and wait. I fix it, and the design gets better for having survived contact with reality.
Why it matters for the people I work with
For a client, this means one coherent vision instead of a committee compromise. The interface is as fast as it is good-looking, because performance was never someone else's problem. And there's one person accountable for the whole experience — from the typography to the database query behind it.
That's the whole pitch, really: design and engineering aren't two phases of a project. They're the same conversation, and I'm trying to have it without interruptions.