Production AI in a regulated industry
An AI appraisal platform for machinery and equipment, zero to beta in under a year: eighteen microservices, 248 photos a project, sub-second image processing, and inference cost cut sixty percent by caching. Every value traces to evidence, because a number that cannot survive a challenge is worthless in this business.
★ Minnesota Cup 2026 semi-finalist, with Appraisal Dream.
Report progress from source photos to finished report, each AI stage visible in plain language.
Immutable audit trail and chain of custody, one hundred logged events on screen.
Asset grid with AI confidence, comps, and conflict flags the appraiser can override.
The platform reads machinery from field photos while the work queue fills itself.
A sales team that walks a knowledge graph
Fractional CTO for a stone importer. An agent platform of forty nine workflows: harvest, extract, classify, and a knowledge graph the sales team can actually walk. It ran 39,645 production executions at a 0.2 percent failure rate.
677 nodes live in the product, filters open.
People, firms, and shared projects as one network. Blurred on purpose; the client's pipeline stays the client's.
39,645 production executions, 0.2 percent failure, live runs mid flight.
A multi-agent system that runs my projects
The personal lab. Voice memos go in, routed work comes out. Transcription, classification, specialist agents, and locks that keep the whole school of piranhas honest.
The lock and the piranhas. The name is the architecture.
Locks guard protected operations. Specialists own their domains. Live.
Resources, services, and the queue on one board.
A hand-drawn logo, still on the job
Full identity for a national appraisal firm. The mark is hand drawn and mine alone, and it is still running the site today. The two working directions kept their working names: patriotic sporty banky, and warm banky blanky lady friendly.
The live site, captured this week. Logo, hero, and the machinery it appraises.
The hand-drawn mark. Navy and red on cream.
Same letterforms, colder palette.
The same construction on a solid ground.
Taxonomy research that earned its keep
Card sorts, then a Treejack tree test, on the HGTV Home paint taxonomy. Twelve categories went in, seven came out, utility navigation dropped from six to two, and user confidence rose thirteen percent: six points in the first round and seven in the second.
Twelve to eleven to seven, drawn from the study's real numbers.
Round one, side by side. Six percent more confidence, footprint down from twelve to eleven, and the categories nobody could place named outright.
Gathering inspiration, color selection, painting. Every surviving category had to earn a place in one of the three.
Zero orphaned categories. Utility features down from six categories to two.
The mortgage funnel on one wall
Mortgage.com and the first time homebuyer experience. Funnel architecture, SEO capture, and page level design for the bank's mortgage business.
The full funnel on one board: entry points, guided selling, fifty state rates pages, calculators, conversion.
Triage, product comparison, and content warehousing.
Every rates page and the paths between them, mapped before touching anything.
The proposed flow with the CTA hierarchy called out.
Why people actually move, plotted on cost and space.
Making range anxiety a design problem
Design sprints for EV charging at BMW's Chicago technology office. Whiteboards, timed sketching, and a concept model that treated range as an experience problem instead of a battery problem.
Driver, vehicle, distance, time, range, destination. The whole problem on one whiteboard.
Actions, thoughts, and touchpoints mapped live.
Home, destinations, detail, activity. Arrival time keeps asking to exist.
Rob, 31, commutes in an EV and cannot find morning charging.
Eight minutes, as many good ideas as fit on the page.
Four red dots per person. Clusters emerge, bad ideas welcome.
Scroll for the rest of the wall →
Range polygons on the map, walking directions for the last block.
Fifty people, flipped from print to digital
Go East was a fifty-person litho print shop that had become an agency, 3M on the books. I came in as executive creative director to rebrand, reposition, and re-staff it as a digital and social studio, and to do it without a mass exodus. It became Thread, and was later acquired by Kick. The identity was not drawn once: NowThreading grows the mark from share, like, and comment data, so the logo is an output, not a file.
Ian Davis coded the backend that drove the live logo.
Arc and pentagon controls wired to social data.
Same tool, different data, different mark. That is the point.
Pentagon studies, from silhouette inventory to overlays.
The mark that landed.
Enterprise tools with money on every row
Marketing Partner Agreements for Target's marketing organization. Dense tables, approval flows, and seven figures committed in the page header.
Approvals, filters, and a dollar figure on every row.
Media details, required information, and the comment trail that gets it approved.
Actuals against plan against forecast, editable in place.
Putting an agency on the map in digital
Olson's digital offering was two people, Chris Henderson and me, against fifteen at Space150. Twelve or more sites a year. UV Vodka launched with no print and no outdoor, digital only, and became the best-selling product in Phillips Distilling's history. One year Chris and I took nearly every AdFed digital award.
★ One Show Merit, 2002 annual, Interactive. Credited as programmer, co-credited music and sound.
The tale of a heroic spirit. Five generations, and the age gate to prove it.
Distilled four times, for five generations. The bottle and the label red half this palette came from.
A tile-based isometric engine written in ActionScript: A* pathfinding, enemy AI, fog of war, leaderboard.
The walls spell VERY EVIL. That was my call, not the engine's.
Rotary phone, CRT weather forecast, Darius Miles. Nothing else on the internet looked like this.
Passion, pride, intensity, work ethic. If you got 'em, great.
More mayhem awaits. Going up?
Face-morph navigation for a census-style campaign.
Ten thousand customers would like to speak to you immediately. Now they can.
The agency reel, pixel man and all.