I often locate the beginning of my professional life not at my first job, but earlier—when Eddie Opara visited my undergraduate program at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. At the time, I did not think of this as entrepreneurship. It simply felt like work. Only later did I understand that I was inside someone else’s founding moment—close enough to feel the risk, but not positioned to claim its outcomes. He encountered my interactive senior thesis, a project grounded in emergence theory, systems thinking, and interaction as a way of revealing unseen structure. At the time, I understood the project as speculative and conceptual. In retrospect, it was also aspirational: an early attempt to reconcile design, systems, and meaning.
Not long after, I found myself working at The Map Office—my first job after undergrad—where belief in the power of design was not only encouraged but operationalized. The studio was rigorous, demanding, and fast. Craft mattered. Detail mattered. Taste mattered. There was an implicit promise that if you worked hard enough, refined enough, and stayed close enough to the work, design could do something in the world.
At The Map Office, I worked across branding, interactive media, and print. I built Flash-based interactive projects that quietly introduced me to object-oriented programming long before I had language for it. I worked on branding and marketing projects for real estate clients, where design served capital directly and unapologetically. I produced printed matter of every scale, learning how precision, repetition, and restraint could communicate authority.
Working with Eddie meant being close to someone whose trajectory was clearly ascending. The studio itself functioned as a platform, one that would eventually support his migration to partnership at Pentagram. At the time, it was easy to imagine design as a ladder: learn the craft, do the work, move upward. I remember attending the AIGA Why Conference in San Diego and unexpectedly finding myself in conversation with Paula Scher and Michael Bierut—talking shop, talking careers, talking about the New York office I had declined to join. These moments felt like brief confirmations that I was near something consequential.
Over time, however, belief began to thin. Much of my labor involved microscopic refinement—adjusting kerning, alignment, transitions, and micro-interactions with an intensity that bordered on anxiety. The work demanded obsession. It rewarded precision. And it rarely acknowledged the human cost of sustaining that level of attention. Projects concluded. Clients moved on. Artifacts circulated briefly and then dissolved into the visual noise of design culture.
Years later, I would encounter language that clarified this experience: the idea that design is often structurally limited in what it can actually change, that it circulates meaning without redistributing power. But the recognition came earlier, through repetition rather than theory. The work had not failed. It had simply done exactly what the system allowed it to do.
Despite this, the period was not meaningless. I collaborated on cultural projects with institutions like the Studio Museum in Harlem, contributed to UCLA Architecture & Urban Design’s end-of-year show Rumble, and participated in interactive work with studios like Potion Design. These experiences expanded my understanding of design’s reach while clarifying its limits. They revealed how institutions speak through design, how legitimacy is constructed, and how designers often function as intermediaries rather than authors.
Eventually, I left New York for Los Angeles—not because I couldn’t do the work, but because I no longer wanted the future it implied. I did not want proximity to prestige to be mistaken for agency. Leaving was not an escape. It was a refusal.
In retrospect, this period prepared me exceptionally well—not for recognition, but for endurance. It taught me how systems actually function, how labor is absorbed, and how belief is sustained and unraveled at the same time. That knowledge has remained useful.