Hi. I'm Drew.

Curbs and wax

I grew up in Canada, just east of Toronto. As a kid, my world was bikes, Star Wars, drawing, and eventually skateboarding. I fucking loved drawing.

Around sixth grade, my friends and I discovered skating. We waxed curbs, found whatever spots we could, and stayed out until dusk. There were convenience-store sugar runs, video games in basements, terrible attempts at tricks, bruised hips, and an unreasonable amount of time thinking about shoes.

Skateboarding ended up shaping me in ways I wouldn't understand until much later. It introduced me to this enormous culture surrounding the actual act of skating—art, photography, typography, music, fashion, filmmaking, and people making weird shit simply because they wanted it to exist.

I think that's probably where I became a designer. I just didn't know what one was yet.

Beige boxes

Then came the computer.

My dad was an art, photography, and shop teacher, and the school where he worked had Macs. Lovely little beige boxes that completely rewired my brain. My first was a Mac Classic.

I messed around in MacPaint, played Dark Castle, and eventually discovered desktop publishing. By sixth grade I was scanning family photos on a black-and-white flatbed scanner and laying things out in QuarkXPress. By high school, I was the kid people asked for help in the computer lab. At night I was dialing into BBSs, downloading Star Wars MIDI files and making questionable art in Photoshop.

Computers didn't replace drawing for me. They just made the canvas considerably stranger.

That stuck.

Three jobs and a print shop

In high school I sold shoes at the mall, played guitar in makeshift bands, and worked at Toronto's largest indoor private skatepark. The skatepark had a wide, mellow mini-ramp that I loved to slide out on and bruise my hips.

The mall is also where I met my wife. We liked shoes. Then, conveniently, each other.

I went to college for Graphic Design, where I somehow ended up running the print shop and providing unofficial tech support while also attempting to become a better designer. During the summers I worked another job where I learned computerized embroidery, screen printing, and 3D cardboard model making.

I also learned a surprising amount about how the local biker gang operated coffee trucks.

That's another story.

Making things move

I graduated in 2000 and stayed on at the small design studio where I'd interned. I built websites, made animations in Flash and After Effects, and developed a habit that has followed me for my entire career: if I didn't know how to make something, I'd learn the tool required to make it.

I spent the next thirteen years bouncing around advertising and design. Graphic design became interactive design. Interactive design became motion. Motion led to interfaces.

Eventually I realized the thing I was most interested in wasn't making an advertisement for someone else's product.

It was making the product.

Product

That realization led me to work on cinemagraph creation software for Mac and iOS. I'd spent years learning animation, and suddenly I was trying to take all that knowledge and turn it into a workflow simple enough that almost anyone could make something beautiful.

It was the first time I really understood what product design could be. It also resulted in an Apple Design Award, which was not something kid-me screwing around on a Mac Classic had accounted for.

In 2014, I packed up and moved to San Francisco to join Fitbit. Moving to California was one of those things I knew I'd regret if I never tried.

At Fitbit, I helped design and ship an app used by millions of people, worked on device experiences and animation, got deep into design systems, and continued trying to figure out how motion could make software easier to understand—not just prettier to look at.

From there came SoFi, where I worked on investing products, design systems, and motion principles.

Then Weber, where somehow my career led to designing connected grills. I redesigned the connected grilling experience, helped build UI systems for the products around it, worked on smart grills and probes, and got to obsess over what happens when software leaves the screen and starts controlling something very hot in your backyard.

Twenty-something years into doing this professionally, the underlying problem hadn't really changed: take something complicated, understand it, and make it feel obvious.

Now

These days I'm designing AI-powered research tools and thinking a lot about what happens next. Not AI replaces designers next. The more interesting next.

What happens when the tools change enough that designers can make things they previously needed entire teams to build? What does prototyping mean when the prototype can actually work? Where does design end and engineering begin when that boundary gets increasingly fuzzy?

I've started writing code.

This should concern everyone.

Mostly, though, I'm still doing what I've always done: finding new tools, poking at them until I understand them, and trying to make interesting things.

Apparently the beige boxes were foreshadowing.

Elsewhere

When I'm not designing, I'm usually with my family, wandering around Disneyland, playing video games, listening to an audiobook while attempting to close my Apple Watch rings, or disappearing into some new project that absolutely did not need to become a project.

I still love Star Wars. I still love Volkswagens. I still occasionally pick up a guitar. And somewhere along the way I became deeply, perhaps irresponsibly, interested in making pizza.

Aspiring pizzaiolo. We'll see how it goes.

I don't skateboard nearly as much as I used to. But I think a lot of the kid waxing curbs and making weird shit because he thought it was cool is still responsible for what I do today.

And I'm pretty happy about that.

Have a look around. There are selected projects, a full archive going back to 2006, or you can always drop me a line.