Technical · Front End
The surface is the product.
Nobody experiences your architecture. They experience the screen. I came to front end from creative direction, so I hold an interface to the standard of a film frame: intentional, quiet, and earning trust in the first five seconds. Five beliefs, kept as living notes in my second brain and enforced in every repo I own.
001
Clean UX is trust
Software should feel considered, because users read craft as competence. That includes the users people forget: contrast that passes WCAG, focus states that exist, and every animation checking prefers-reduced-motion before it moves. Visual quality changes perceived value, and premium positioning is downstream of premium standards.
002
Performance is a feature
A page is judged at the 75th percentile of real users, not on my machine. Core Web Vitals are the floor: largest paint inside 2.5 seconds, interactions under 200 milliseconds, layout shift near zero. The cheapest JavaScript is the JavaScript never shipped, so rendering starts on the server and the client gets only what interaction requires.
003
Remove a decision or don't ship it
AI should reduce cognitive load, not add feeds, alerts, and dashboards to manage. Apple's on-device model is a 3 billion parameter LLM that is strong at extraction and classification and weak at open-ended reasoning, so AXON gives it exactly that job: parse the sentence, route the item, confirm with the user. Deterministic code does the planning.
004
Native over generic
Meet the platform where it lives. On iOS one App Intents definition surfaces the same action in Siri, Spotlight, Shortcuts, widgets, and the Action button, which is why AXON made that investment once instead of building five integrations. On the web it means typed React and motion used like a film cut: sparingly and on purpose.
005
Structure creates creative freedom
Design systems exist so taste can compound. One content file drives every page, tokens replace one-off values, and components replace pages. Good structure removes the overhead of remembering and hands that attention back to the work. This site runs exactly that way.
How I work
005
- 01SwiftUI on iOS, Next.js with Tailwind on the web. Server components by default, client components only where state lives.
- 02One content file per site, so copy never touches components and the design system stays honest.
- 03Real data in every design review. If a screen needs a populated day to be judged, I seed a demo user and design the empty states separately.
- 04Dark and light, phone and display, reduced motion on and off. A screen counts as done when it holds up in all of them.
- 05Taste is maintained like code: curated references, one visual language held for years, details like letter-spacing treated as load-bearing.