I’m a product designer at Atelier Norte, a two-person studio in the old print district. I grew up taking apart radios and never quite finishing putting them back together, which turns out to be decent training for this work — I studied graphic design, drifted into interfaces because that’s where the work was, and stayed because the constraints are honest: someone has to use the thing tomorrow.
Before the studio I spent eight years in product design at larger companies. Those years taught me what scale does to software — every quarter another menu, every reorg another dashboard. I kept a private list titled “features we shipped that nobody asked for.” When the list passed a hundred entries, I quit. I believe software should be smaller, slower to change, and kinder to attention — and at a studio of two, that belief gets to be a practice instead of a slide.
My work now splits between client projects — mostly tools for writers and researchers — and the lab, where I build the small utilities I always wished existed.
Outside work: the greyhound is named Biro, the mechanical pencil collection is unreasonable, and there’s a slow project underway to cook every recipe in one very stained Lebanese cookbook. Current progress: forty-one of ninety, two of them twice, one of them never again.