Most designers never find out what their decisions cost.

Founding designer. I build the brand, design the product, and write the front end that ships it.

Inside my own work since 2018

In December 2018 I joined CurbNTurf as one of three people at a bootstrapped company. A founder, a developer, and me. There was a platform that barely worked and no visual identity at all. I built the brand, the product, the website, and two native apps. Today it’s 500+ hosts with published listings and a 4.8 host rating, and I’m still designing it, now working into the backend.

I’ve had to keep using my own decisions, and rebuild the ones that turned out wrong.

That’s the whole of it. Years of living inside my own work, watching which calls held up and which ones quietly made someone else’s job harder. It changes what you reach for.

I design and I build

Early on I moved our work into Webflow so developers got working code instead of a mockup and a conversation. These days it is Figma to design, production Next.js and React to ship, with design systems, iOS, and Android along the way. That keeps the distance between “this should change” and “it’s live” short, which is most of what a small team actually needs. AI sits in both halves of that now: it is how I work, agentic coding against the real repo rather than autocomplete in a sidebar, and increasingly it is what I build, LLM and RAG systems running inside a client’s own accounts.

The Tink Tank

The Tink Tank is my studio. It has run since 2018, alongside the day job, for clients across SaaS, healthcare, retail, and commerce. Most of the roster is under NDA. The one I’d show you first is a large-print book manufacturer: two brand identities, and a quoting and checkout system that sells into school districts and state contracts. Business has tripled since it launched.

There’s a thread through most of it. Large, messy catalogs, and the person who has to find one thing inside them.

Five hundred pieces of private land. Twenty-four thousand sports cards. A publisher’s full catalog, browsed by a librarian who knows exactly what her collection is missing. Search, taxonomy, hierarchy, and the difference between browsing and already knowing what you want. I didn’t plan that. I noticed it after the fact, which is usually how the real ones show up.

Printed on cardboard

The first design I ever paid attention to was printed on cardboard and sold in a foil pack.

I collected Michael Jordan in the nineties, which is when the card companies got strange. Foil, die cuts, printing on plastic, techniques nobody needed for a photograph of a basketball player. I did not have the word design yet. I knew some of them were better than the others and I wanted to know why. Coqui Cardboard is that question again, with a build pipeline.

Architecture was the second one. I studied architecture, then civil engineering, and took longer than I should have to notice that the part I liked was the same part in both. Midcentury houses are still my favorite thing to look at, and the same period pulled me toward its designers. Paul Rand, Charles and Ray Eames, Saul Bass, Massimo Vignelli, Milton Glaser. There are Eames pieces in my office I probably should not have bought.

I live in San Juan because my wife, Lorena, is Boricua and her parents are getting older. We wanted to be close enough to help, and we are looking for a house here while we settle in.

Puerto Rico is a US territory, so there is no visa or sponsorship question. I am bilingual in English and Spanish, I have worked remotely for years, and I am looking for fully remote roles with US companies.

Away from a screen: basketball, the mountains, drawing. Lately I want to make physical things again, objects rather than interfaces. Same instinct as the cards, probably. Something you can hold, that somebody had to decide every part of.

Product design, design leadership, design engineering. Any size company. If that is the person your team is short, or you want somebody who can step in and raise what a team ships, I’d like to talk.