Journey

Smashing Magazine highlighted my work as a Design Systems Architect building strategic frameworks rather than just component libraries, and my contributions to the community through mentoring, teaching, writing Mise en Mode, and hosting Undefined. A genuine honor, and a reminder that the best part of this work is sharing it with others.

After years of research and a technique first shared at Clarity 2023, Mise en Mode became a book. Structured in three parts, Concept, Develop, and Future, it presents an intent-based approach that replaces token bloat with modes that express context, and works through practical implementation with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript across multi-brand and inclusive design challenges.

Find it at mode.place.

To ground my work on AI in design systems, I completed several certifications in April 2026:

• LLM Fine-Tuning and Customization Training, Simplilearn
• AI Ethics, Alex Genadinik
• Avoiding AI Harm, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center
• Crafting AI Identities: Strategies & Ethical Considerations, Coursera

The throughline is responsible, intentional AI: not just what these systems can generate, but what they should, and how that maps onto the governance and brand questions design systems already grapple with. This study runs alongside building the D’Amato Design MCP server.

At FIT, I work with students who often arrive from adjacent creative disciplines and are applying that sensibility to digital products for the first time. The courses move from framing a research question and recruiting participants, through synthesizing findings into wireframes, and on to clickable prototypes ready for evaluation, with a focus on building the vocabulary and confidence to defend design decisions with evidence.

The recap of a year-long research and development journey: a better technical model for expression within consistency. Boxing a region and giving it new values for existing semantic tokens means a system can feel expressive exactly where it needs to, without minting new tokens.

Design Systems House marked the shift from contributing to the practice to building durable infrastructure for it, a brand bigger than my own name that can host community work and outlast any single portfolio.

Alongside founding Design Systems House, I took on focused consulting engagements, including Candy Digital in 2022 and Sensible in 2023. These short, intensive collaborations let me bring the patterns I’d developed, semantic tokens, theming, and composable components, to teams working through their own design systems challenges.

Gridless Design distilled a point of view I’d been refining for years: the web rewards working with the medium, not porting print conventions onto it.

Teaching at the University of Miami extended a thread that runs throughout my career: sharing the practice with the next generation. It ran in parallel with my industry work, keeping one foot in academia and one in production.

Teaching reinforced a belief that runs through my work: the best design systems don’t just grow products, they grow people too.

Across the enterprise, the lesson crystallized: a small, bounded, semantic token vocabulary goes much further than exposing every primitive, and fast, human support keeps partner teams trusting the system.

This was my transition from building features to building the systems, and the team, that let everyone else build consistently. Much of that work still ships at Compass today.

Itemize is where I learned that honest technical opinions build trust faster than agreement, and that optimizing the highest-frequency workflow pays outsized dividends.

My academic foundation at NYIT spanned fine arts and communication arts, and led directly to my first teaching role, guiding students through producing and streaming live shows.

This was the chapter before the web. I began as an artist with a goal of making creative interactions, but exposure was hard to come by, so I held a long-running role as an investigator at UPS while exploring digital mediums on the side. The discipline and curiosity from that period carried directly into how I’d later approach code, design, and design systems.