Retirement Announcement

The better I got at design, the further I drifted from what I actually am.

I have been living a lie.

No, not that one. A totally different lie. Though, honestly, they share more in common than I realized until very recently.

For 31 years I have called myself a designer. I put it on business cards, LinkedIn profiles, conference badges, job applications. Principal Service Designer. UX Designer. Interaction Designer. Web Designer. The titles kept evolving, the word designer stayed anchored at the center of all of them, and I let it define me because it paid the bills.

It was never the right word.

I am a maker. I have always been a maker. The distance between what I called myself and what I actually am has been the central tension of my entire professional life.

This is what it looks like when the tension finally breaks.

I Was Already Building

Before I had a computer, I had stories.

I was writing short stories and novels and comic books through the 80s and into the 90s, long before I knew what HTML was or that a career in technology existed. I had an electric typewriter at home with a backspace key that fed a whiteout correction ribbon, and that was the pinnacle of my personal technology stack.

This had a white-out backspace ribbon!

The instinct was always to make. Not to arrange or critique or advise. To make. Stories. Worlds. Systems. I was building Dungeons and Dragons campaigns on notebook paper, mapping out dungeons, designing encounters, figuring out how the rules interacted so that the game would actually work when my friends sat down to play.

I would not have called it design then. I would have called it building things. Because that is what it was.

The distinction matters more than it sounds. Design implies a relationship to someone else’s execution. You design it, someone else builds it. Building implies the thing itself, start to finish. From the very beginning, before any screen or tool or job title, I was building.

The First Thing I Did Was Try to Make Something

I got my first real computer in the mid-90s, somewhere around 13 or 14 years old. I had missed the Commodore 64. I had missed the Amiga (I used them at school, but at home, the typewriter was the machine). The very first thing I did with that computer was try to build a Dungeons and Dragons character sheet database using Visual Basic and Microsoft Access 2.0.

Not browse the web. Not play games. Build something.

I did not know what I was doing. I barely understood what a database was. But I could see the shape of what I wanted (a system that tracked characters, stats, inventories, connected things to each other) and I was willing to fight the tools until they cooperated.

Then I started writing HTML. Not in an editor. From the DOS terminal. Saving .htm files by hand and opening them in a browser to see if my Times New Roman text rendered right. No CSS. It did not exist yet. No style whatsoever. Just structure and content, built raw.

I think the first time I saw a design app build HTML was Microsoft Publisher, which predated even FrontPage. And yes, I did then get FrontPage, HoTMetaL, and all the rest. I was creating those Access 2.0 databases, connecting sites to them with CGI scripts. That’s right: CGI. Anyone younger than 40 won’t even know what CGI is. I was writing it while Bill Clinton was still in office.

My first “design” was a hand-coded Warcraft 2 fan page submitted to the Yahoo! directory in 1996. No autolayout, no Figma, no CSS. Pure, unadulterated creativity with zero boundaries.

I have always had taste and craft. War-Craft, that is. Don’t click the image….

I learned Corel PhotoPaint. Then Photoshop. Because the things I made needed to look good for anyone to take them seriously. But the visual skill was always in service of the making. I did not learn computers and then decide to make things. I decided to make things and learned computers as a side effect.

The making came first. It always came first.

The Lane You Cannot Leave

I got my first paying job at 17. I dropped out of high school after 11th grade to take it. That is not the romantic version of this story where the visionary skips college to start a company in a garage. I was 17, it was the late 90s, the web was exploding, and someone was willing to pay me to build things on it. I did the math. The math said go.

They paired me with a ColdFusion programmer. I wrote the HTML. I made the Photoshop slices. He wrote the backend logic. Just like that, a career lane opened beneath my feet and started moving.

The lane was design. And THIS is what design looked like:

Allaire ColdFusion Studio, circa 1998

My career was set. Not because I chose it. Because the paycheck chose it. And once a paycheck decides your identity, the economics of survival take over with compound interest.

Richard Sennett wrote about this in The Craftsman: the historical divide between the hand and the head, the slow separation of thinking about work from doing the work. He traced it back to the guilds and the industrial revolution. But Sennett was describing centuries of institutional drift. I was living it in real time, one promotion at a time.

The better you get at the thing that pays, the harder it becomes to leave for the thing you want.

That is the maker’s paradox. Or what Pressfield calls, the “shadow career.” It was what I could do, but not what I should do.

Every year I invested in design skills, I got promoted. Every promotion made me more valuable as a designer. Every raise made the opportunity cost of switching lanes steeper. The trap does not feel like a trap because it looks exactly like success. I became very good at what I did, world-class, elite. But, it felt performative, it felt hollow. I cared nothing for the career path, it was ancillary to my dreams, but it paid the bills, and paid well.

The conventional wisdom is follow your passion. I have heard it a hundred times. But passion does not override rent. Passion does not cover health insurance. And passion cannot explain to your manager why you want a demotion to an entry-level engineering role after fifteen years of climbing the design ladder.

So you stay. You get better at the compromise. And every year the wall between what you are and what you do gets a little taller.

Close Enough to Touch

I was never entirely on the design side of that wall. Which made it excruciating.

I lived on GitHub. I used Sass, LESS, Jade, every preprocessor that let me write something that felt like code even if the industry classified it as design tooling. I worked with engineers where I was right on the edge of writing the JavaScript, the Clojure, the TypeScript, the PHP, always right on the edge.

I got pretty okay at PHP, pretty okay at CoffeeScript.

Forked Bootstrap and rewrote it for QuickBooks Online myself. In a cave. With Scraps

But “pretty okay” does not pay the mortgage. “Pretty okay” is a hobby that looks like a competency from a distance but dissolves the moment you need it to carry your career. You cannot walk into a hiring conversation and say, “I have been a principal designer for fifteen years, but actually, I am pretty okay at PHP, so would you mind if I started over?”

I tried to cross that line. At Intuit, I was one of the first senior design technologists, building the entire mobile-first responsive SCSS framework for QuickBooks from a purely engineering standpoint. An offer came to move fully into frontend development. Intuit would pay for React courses, give me the runway to retool.

I turned it down. Not because I did not want it. Because the math was brutal. It would mean years of rebuilding as a junior or mid-level developer. If I were ten or fifteen years younger, maybe. But I was past the midpoint. Like being halfway from Los Angeles to Hawaii: turning back is actually longer than continuing forward.

So I continued forward. In the wrong lane. I was so intimidated, my idols were never the designers. They were the people who shipped products and wrote code and could point at something in the world and say I made that. The founders. The indie builders. The people who had an idea on Tuesday and a working version by Friday. I wanted to be that. Not the person who designed the thing someone else brought to life. The one who brought it to life.

You know the feeling. The tool is right there. You can see the architecture of what you want to build so clearly it feels like a memory of something you already made. But the career you spent decades building is a wall, and wanting something different is not a plan. It is a fantasy with a résumé problem.

What Happens When You Stop Pretending

At a certain point, the pretending got heavy enough that I set it down.

I pivoted to service design. Not because I had some grand revelation about systems thinking (though I would come to appreciate it). Because I was jaded. I needed distance from the pixels and wireframes and the increasingly hollow feeling of designing things for other people to build while I moved on to the next Figma file.

Service design was a lateral escape. A way to stay in the building without being in the room where things got made. I wrote a whole book to escape it, toured the world, spoke at conferences.

Downloaded ~100,000 times, and there is even a paperback for people who insist.

And then I started thinking about leaving tech entirely. I didn’t enjoy being a designer. I didn’t enjoy how that role slotted into organizations, and it didn’t really align with my internal drives and passions. I felt like I was so much more than just a designer. I wanted to be an end-to-end producer and builder and maker, bringing things from concept to customer, not just having my little corner to sit and polish pixels, and I didn’t see any way out.

(The truth is, I was looking at the door. Not burned out. Not taking a sabbatical. Done. Done with the fundamental structure of a career where I think of things and other people build them, because that was never what I wanted, and the distance between the wanting and the doing had become something I could not carry anymore.)

Career paths are designed by HR departments, not by the people walking them. When yours was built for a version of you that was always a compromise, eventually you run out of room to pretend it fits.

The 35-Year Backlog

And then the ceiling disappeared.

I cannot pinpoint the exact moment. It was not one tool or one announcement or one viral demo. It was the accumulation. Claude Code. Agentic development. The quiet emergence of tools that do not replace the engineer but extend the maker. Tools that take “pretty okay at PHP” and bridge it all the way across the wall.

See, the conventional wisdom about AI development is that it threatens engineers. That it replaces people who write code. What I have experienced is something different. Something stranger and more personal. It creates builders out of people who were always builders but could never get the economics to cooperate.

I have a backlog. Thirty-five years of ideas, products, systems, projects that I could see clearly in my head but could not build alone. Not because I lacked the vision or the thinking or even the technical intuition. Because I lacked the economic permission to dismantle an entire career and rebuild it around making instead of directing.

That permission did not come from a manager. Not from a credential. Not from a bootcamp or a blessing from some engineering gatekeeping committee. It came from a terminal window and the slow realization that the wall I had been staring at for three decades was not there anymore. Like the Babbage Difference Engine being built, the dream was finally possible, only I got to be alive to see it.

The question was never whether AI would replace designers. The question, the one nobody was asking, was what happens when the makers who spent decades misclassified as designers can finally make.

So I am retiring from design.

Not quite the right word. You do not retire from something that was always a compromise. You evolve past it. You stop accepting a label that fit the economics but never fit the person.

I am a systems auteur. A Zero Vector designer and developer. A maker who, for the first time in 35 years, has tools that match the ambition I have been carrying since I was 14 years old, writing Visual Basic in a bedroom and not knowing what to call myself, only knowing I wanted to build.

One career ends. A new one starts. And the lie I told for 31 years (the one about being a designer, the one about being content in the lane, the one about not needing more) finally gets to stop.

Not even the biggest transition I have ever made.

Bonus content: See the Warcraft 2 page here.