Twenty-five years designing complex systems, from enterprise platforms to AI-integrated tools to products where being wrong has consequences.
Twenty-five years designing for complex organizations, from small product teams to enterprise platforms. Every engagement starts with the same question, “What breaks if this is wrong?”
End-to-end experience design grounded in research: usability testing, heuristic evaluation, journey mapping, and contextual inquiry, including inside classified and high-security environments. Building design organizations, establishing governance, and connecting UX outcomes to business metrics.
Product direction from first concept to shipped release. Defining what gets built and in what order, then designing the flows, states, and edge cases the roadmap depends on.
Interfaces where the model does the work and the person stays in control. Designed for trust, transparency, and appropriate reliance rather than blind acceptance.
Component frameworks adopted across multi-agency programs serving 2,000+ users. Consistency at enterprise scale without slowing the teams that build on them.
I’ve led brand development at three companies, working directly with leadership and stakeholders to rethink and evolve their brands, guiding a creative team through exploration and refinement until we landed on the final identity. You can see more work on GDP.
Grayson Design Partners is the creative studio Joy and I built around the kind of work we love to do, thoughtful design, smart strategy, and good ideas that actually get used. We bring experience across UX, branding, visual communication, digital products, and technology, giving clients senior-level creative thinking without the layers of a traditional agency.
A client ran a real intelligence dashboard program and asked: could I design and build something that pulls nine incompatible feeds together and makes them make sense to somebody who has never seen the screen before?
Intel Layer is the answer. Air traffic, orbital assets, seismic events, weather warnings and reference geography on one 3D Earth. Every feed is public, live, and named on screen. Nothing is mocked, because mock data lets a designer avoid every problem that matters.
Explore the live demo
Live view. 500 aircraft, 295 orbital assets, 211 seismic events, all sources nominal.
Photorealistic 3D map tools usually arrive with a flight-sim cockpit: two dozen controls nobody asked for. Explorer is my attempt at the opposite, the whole planet in photorealistic 3D, driven by a search field and one button.
It streams Google’s Photorealistic 3D Tiles through Cesium ion, in the browser. Type a place, Pittsburgh, PA, hit GO, and the camera flies you over the real Golden Triangle, rivers and bridges and all. A compass and a tilt readout handle the rest.
Explore the live demo
Live view. Pittsburgh’s Golden Triangle at a −16° low angle.
The tools exist. The strategy to use them usually does not. I map where AI creates real advantage in a team’s daily work, implement it, and build the habits that keep it in use after the engagement ends.
A working guide to using AI well, written for teams, not for engineers.
Where AI saves hours rather than minutes, identified across the processes a team actually runs.
Custom workflows, prompt libraries, and internal tools built to a team’s own outputs and standards.
Change management that reaches the whole team, not only the early adopters.
Interfaces where the model carries the load and the person keeps the decision.
Every engagement starts by identifying the failure that matters most, then works backwards from that answer.
Stakeholder mental models, workflow failure points, existing tools, and what people actually do versus what they say they do.
Information architecture, AI integration mapping, and component logic, absorbing complexity so the people using the system do not have to.
High-fidelity prototypes a team can stress-test before code is written. Flaws cost hours here rather than months later.
Embedding with teams, establishing governance, and building capability that outlasts the engagement.
“Complexity is the enemy of execution. Great design does not decorate a system. It removes every obstacle between a person and the decision they need to make.”
Jon Grayson (I say this all the time.)
Your session, read in real time. A small demonstration of what becomes possible when design and data share the same intention.
Whether you are integrating AI into an organization’s workflows, redesigning a complex product, or looking for a senior design partner, tell me what you are solving.