Built through effort. Seen in the work.
The jungle gym takes energy and curiosity, but every climb earns a new view.
My portfolio works the same way. With each project, I pull myself higher.
The more you explore, the more it reveals.
Portfolio
Selected work
Recent independent projects demonstrating product thinking, systems design, and experimentation.
Regifting Is OK
Turns out the hard part of regifting isn't the guilt. It's the memory. Designed a fun, focused app that makes sure you never hand a gift back to the person who gave it.
Seven Ports
One online trading game, five different worlds wrapped around the same gameplay engine. The design challenge was making sure the themes never broke the gameplay.
Recipe Coster
Ingredient costs creep. Margins disappear. Designed a SaaS that makes the problem visible before it becomes a crisis.
AI Independent Study
Figured out where AI actually helps ship creative work, and where you still have to show up yourself.
Enterprise UX Experience
Before the independent projects above, I spent several years leading UX and UI work across multiple public-facing websites and an enterprise intranet at a national organization.
At the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA), I worked in content-heavy, multi-stakeholder environments with real operational constraints - supporting thousands of users across public sites and internal platforms, and driving measurable improvements in engagement, discovery, and adoption.
A note on case study selection: My professional work at NRECA and earlier at Mike Truese Creations is represented on my resume, but not as formal case studies here.
Much of that work is no longer publicly viewable, has changed over time, or reflects design patterns from an earlier era.
Rather than reconstruct outdated artifacts, I focused this portfolio on recent, clearly labeled independent projects that reflect how I think and design today.