Recognition

About Joe

From craft to systems —
a designer who builds
what others build with.

I came to design through the graphic arts — the kind of foundation where you develop strong opinions about typefaces before you know what a design system is. A BFA from TCU, a Computer Graphics class in high school that I never fully recovered from, and a brief post-2008 detour into banking that confirmed, conclusively, that I needed to be making things.

For a decade, I built and led the art and design program at Jesuit College Preparatory in Dallas — starting as an in-house designer and communications director, eventually running the department, managing student publication teams, and developing new courses in photography, graphic design, and studio art. What I learned there is something I've carried into every role since: the hardest design problem is rarely the aesthetic one. It's getting an organization to do something consistently, across people, over time.

That's what pulled me toward systems. When you're advising a team of fifteen students on a 400-page publication and your name is on the cover, you learn very quickly that taste alone doesn't scale. Infrastructure does.

Since joining LeadsOnline in 2024, I've been applying that same instinct to a much larger problem: designing a global brand system for investigative software used by law enforcement, building the internal tools that let non-designers create brand-compliant materials, and designing the product interfaces that investigators actually use to do their work.

The AI-assisted tooling has become the part of my work I'm most interested in right now — not because it's novel, but because it's the clearest example I've found of using design to multiply the creative capacity of people who aren't designers.

Career Arc

How I Work

Education & Development