The greatest developer, designer, and musician.

Everything I do is the same job.

Light is a wave. Sound is a wave. Your attention, right now, reading this line and not the next one, is a wave too. It rises, it peaks, it decays. Everything that reaches a person arrives through one of these three channels, and all three obey the same laws: frequency, resonance, interference, silence.

Design is working with light. Music is working with sound. Interfaces are working with attention. I never switch professions. I change the band.

People call this being multidisciplinary. I call it refusing to learn three sets of rules when one will do.

I design things you are not supposed to notice.

A good foundation sits under other people's work and never asks for credit. Most of what I have made carries no name. It lives inside tools that other people use to build their own things, and they are rightly proud of what they built. The best compliment I get is silence: nobody wrote in to ask why the button felt right.

Beauty is not a matter of taste. It is a matter of agreement with the medium. Contrast can be measured. Rhythm can be measured. Harmony, it turns out, can be measured too, and the measurements agree with the eye more often than the eye would like to admit.

I still draw by hand. Paper does not have an undo, and that keeps me honest for about twenty minutes a week.

I write music. Then I needed to understand the room I was writing it in, so I wrote the room.

That is how it always goes. A song needs a space. A space has walls. Walls reflect, absorb, and lie about which one they are doing. At some point the only way to hear clearly is to put the physics on paper and let the equation argue back. It usually wins. It once told me that a wall I had declared perfectly absorbent was, in fact, a mirror. I had been playing a concert for my own echo.

An equation is just another instrument. It is harder to tune than a guitar and much louder when it is wrong.

Music is the only field where I release things under my own name. I did this on purpose, so there would be at least one place to send the blame.

Attention is the scarcest material I work with, and the only one that fights back.

Years ago I drew interfaces where people taught machines what a thing looks like. Click, label, next. Thousands of small acts of patience, and the machines slowly learned to see. Today I draw the interfaces where machines do the work and I teach them what good looks like. I am told this is called progress. From where I sit it is called delegation.

The best interface is the one that is not there. When a person notices the screen, the screen has lost. When they notice the song, the mix has lost. When they notice the designer, well. That is why this page is mostly text.

If the tool I need does not exist, I build it. I would prefer not to. It is slow, it is lonely, and the tool rarely thanks you. But a missing tool is a gap in the medium, and gaps in the medium are where the interesting things leak through.

So I have built a way to see harmony as colour, because nobody had shown me one. I have built a way to hear a room before it existed. I have built a crew of patient machines that do the parts of my work I understand well enough to explain. I gave the head of that crew a name and a suit, which was unnecessary and is the thing people ask about most.

Every tool I build ends up teaching me the thing I built it to avoid learning. I have made peace with this.

I was trained as an engineer and raised as an artist, in that order and at the same time. The engineer wants to know why. The artist wants to know whether. For a long time I thought these were two people arguing. Now I think they are one person asking the question twice.

Taste is what you call physics you have not written down yet. The interval that sounds right sounds right for a reason. The colour that sits well next to another sits well for a reason. The layout that breathes breathes because of a ratio somebody worked out centuries ago and forgot to tell the designers. I would rather know the reason. It makes me slower to start and much faster to finish.

When the numbers and the eye disagree, I check the numbers first. The eye has a history of lying to me about my own work.

Most of making something is removing things.

The space between notes is where the music lives. The empty area on a page is what makes the text readable. The feature you did not ship is the reason the product still works. I spend more time deleting than creating, and I have learned to count the deleting as the work. On a good day I remove something nobody will miss. On a great day I remove something people would have defended.

This page used to be longer.

I have lived in several countries and worked, in the remote sense, in several more. I have learned enough of three alphabets to be dangerous in all of them. Moving taught me the thing no studio ever did: nothing about a place is natural, every rule is a decision somebody made once, and most of them can be redesigned.

I keep the same workspace everywhere. A desk, a screen, an instrument within reach, and a window. The window is not optional. I have tested this.

Everything above is true. I have checked it twice, with an equation and with a mirror.

If you came here expecting a list of jobs, dates, and clients, I understand, and the links below will take you to places that keep those lists more faithfully than I do. This page is not for that. It is for the one idea I have, which is that light, sound, and attention are one thing, and that a person who learns the laws of one is already most of the way to the others.

The rest is practice. And humility, of which I have, as noted, the most.