Joe is an empathetic listener, a design-thinker, a world traveler, and a problem solver with creative solutions.

I was first introduced to the wonders of the Adobe software suite as an impressionable high school sophomore in a "Computer Graphics" course, and have never really been able to let go of my love for design since that fateful class 25 years ago. Once I got to college, I quickly found my way into the competitive Graphic Design program (after a brief foray into the school's Film program), and quickly began developing strong opinions about typefaces and color harmonies. With my BFA in hand, I entered the professional world at the peak of the 2008 financial crisis, so when I landed the only job I could (a non-creative role in banking), it only confirmed conclusively that I needed to be making things.

For over a decade, I built and led the Art & Design program at Jesuit College Preparatory School in Dallas, working to inspire creativity in others through my work as an educator. While starting out in the school’s Advancement office in digital communications, I brought all design work in-house and began to wear an ever-growing pile of hats (web master, graphic designer, social media coordinator, creative director, and more). After three years, the school hired three people to replace me in order to allow me to make the transition to the classroom where I quickly introduced new classes for Photography, Graphic Design, and AP Studio Art (none of which had been offered at the school previously). Once again, over time, my responsibilities grew, and I was eventually a department lead as well as the creative manager and faculty adviser for the school’s student publications. And what I learned in those years is something I've continued to carry with me in every role I’ve held: 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 has pulled me toward systems. When you're advising a team of 20-30 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, designing the product interfaces that investigators actually use to do their work, but also building the internal tools that enable everyone throughout the company (designers and non-designers alike) to create brand-compliant materials.

The AI-assisted tooling that has enabled me to create those infrastructures has become a fascinating and integral new facet to my work... 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.