The creative lead who doesn’t hand the idea off.

Nobody commissioned the storm.

The first campaign isn't the one above. I was starting out, and Jon was art-directing the work himself — which is what most small clients do, and it is the single most common way good work doesn't happen. I was still doing all of it: photography, web, print, graphics, layout, video.
I built what he asked for.

Then a new aircraft arrived and the materials had to be redone.
I delivered exactly what he directed — and then pitched what I would have done instead. That was the Monsoon: name the aircraft, then let the weather that came with the name carry everything. I showed him on a laptop in an Einstein Bagels. He liked it and changed direction. Every award, every surface and every year that followed came out of a pitch nobody asked for.

That's the part worth hiring. Having the better idea is common. Delivering the brief you were given, on time, and then making the case for the one you believe in — without making the client wrong — is how creative direction actually gets earned. You don't win the argument. You make the other option irresistible and let them choose it.

The range, and what it was for

A résumé this wide usually means somebody who couldn't settle.

A boutique ad agency, where the layer I loved was always conceptual direction — the idea that drives the execution. Portraiture, weddings, editorial and commercial photography, long enough to self-publish a coffee-table book: the photography, the marketing, the print production and the writing, all mine. That eye moved into video, and a Part 107 with it. Half a dozen businesses built and run along the way.

None of that is here to say look how many things I can do. Breadth on its own is a warning sign and I'd read it that way too. It earns its place here for one reason: every one of those disciplines is the same question asked in a different medium — is this any good, and how do you know?

Twenty years of asking it. That's the faculty AI hasn't touched. It will hand you a thousand options and hold no opinion about which one is right, and the person who can answer that is doing the only part of the work that didn't just get cheap.

I screenshot my own work and it turns into a review pass.

Assembling the evidence on this page should have been a screenshot session. Both times it became an audit, because I read the output and didn't believe it.

A permit document counting a garage as conditioned living space. Every expense in a ledger signed + — money leaving, marked as money arriving. A debt goal reading “$12,293.50 of $1,500.00 — 0%”: two true numbers arranged into arithmetic that can't be right.

Not one of those could fail a test, because not one of them was a calculation. A test cannot know that “conditioned space” excludes a garage, or that a plus sign on a debit is a lie. That takes somebody who knows the domain, reads the result, and refuses it.

The fear nobody says out loud about AI creative is slop — infinite volume with nobody judging it. Judging it is the job I've been paid for since 2019.

Five tools nobody asked for.

Everything above this line I built at my own desk. These I built inside Intel's validation labs, on the clock, for people who are still using them. Same instinct, seven years, and a job title that says technician.

In 2021 the lab held over a thousand pieces of pre-production silicon across several labs and no way to find any of it — locating one part meant a thirty-minute hand search. I was tired of losing the half hour, so I designed the coding scheme and built the database. It's still what the lab uses.

The four since are the same move. A script that reclaims USB drives which Linux installs have left unreadable — the reason it matters isn't the drives, it's that engineers were interrupting their own work, and each other's, hunting for one that worked. A bringup script that takes a fresh machine from unusable to working, since a new system can't update at all until the corporate proxy configuration is in place and that was being typed by hand every time. A Windows utility that discovers the active COM ports and maps them for serial capture, because the machine already knows which ports are live and making a person retype that is the actual defect. And a PowerShell tool that updates KVM and PDU firmware across the lab and logs what it did, so somebody can audit it afterwards.

I wrote these; AI compressed the work. That's a different claim from the products above, where I set the principles and directed the build against them — and the difference is worth stating rather than blurring. What AI changed here was how fast a noticed problem becomes a shipped fix. It didn't do the noticing.

It's also on the other side of the job, and that side is the one worth hiring. I use AI to troubleshoot systems, and it's wrong often — which isn't a complaint. A wrong answer isn't a failure of the tool; it's a hypothesis. Root cause analysis is the business of killing hypotheses until one survives, and AI generates them faster than I can. That's exactly what I want from it.

A remote desktop service stopped working after a routine point release. The model kept returning to the same fix — switch off the security layer — because that is the answer the internet has for those symptoms. It was wrong, and it was wrong in a way worth understanding: the fault was newer than anything the model had read, so it reached for the most common answer rather than the right one. A model with nothing to draw on doesn't say “I don't know.” It says the most common thing. Knowing that's how it fails is worth more than catching any single wrong answer — and you don't disable a security control to make a service start.

The other half of this is a process, and it is written down.

Everything on this page that involved AI — the products, the interfaces, the copy under pressure — came out of 447 hours across 303 sessions, and at that volume the thing that breaks isn't the model. It's drift. So the way I work became a product of its own: a written operating contract, ten workflows that open and close every session the same way, and 91 automated guards that test the method rather than the output. Two have gone red and were closed the same day, and the page keeps the count visible.

Creative direction and validation turn out to be the same muscle — deciding whether work that looks fine actually is. That is the argument in full on its own page.