Derek Wood Technical Product Designer / Design Engineer

I'm holding out for the right full-time role - I want the right company to go all-in with, not just the next thing that lands on my plate. If you're reading this, there's a good chance you're on my list.

While I've been exploring and talking with different companies, I took on some consulting and rounded out a few side projects - and now I'm all-in on the next team.

The resume comes in three lenses - technical product designer, design engineer, advocate & educator - pick the one that matches your role. Where I can shine and make the most impact depends on the scope and the org.

This is the site you're looking at right now. It had been a long time since I relied on a classic portfolio of work. I have a lot of thoughts on the failures of the common dev portfolio and the way bootcamps teach cookie-cutter case studies - but now that I'm back on the market, I needed a way to tell my less-than-linear story. I took the opportunity to show off my ideas on multi-brand design systems while housing my history in a small but impactful format. If it's doing its job, you'll say: "Woah - Derek's worked across a big range and gone deep in all of it. We want to talk to him."

After years of leading cohorts day to day, I decided to take a much-needed break to reset. But students kept asking to go through the course. So I tried an experiment: what would happen if it were self-paced? Would people speed up? Get lost?

I'm a big fan of cohort-style learning - and I didn't want to lose that magic - but self-paced turned out to open up a lot of interesting opportunities. After enough successful trials, I decided to redesign from a daily drip to a system that lets people go at their own pace with clear milestone checkpoints, based on a monthly membership.

PE's LMS has many types of figures and diagrams making up the workshop pages. When we first started, we'd often use macOS screenshots to show the UI, drop shadow and all - but those files are big, and it's rough to calculate the shadow size and align everything. There are semantic concerns, plus real-world ones - like a light image sitting on a light background, and how colors hold up across themes. So I designed a more programmatic approach that lets you show an image inside a UI we have full control over. This keeps our images sized down and more maintainable, and it's more fun.

PE students live in real code and real projects - that's core to how DFTW works. But some ideas are best explored right on the workshop page. I researched everything under the sun, prototyped a base editor, tested it with real students, refined it, and put it into practice across the curriculum - fully themeable to be incorporated into any system.

Information architecture is the core of all good communicative design, but too often we rush past it only to be misguided at every downstream turn. So when I was asked to chair the 2026 World IA Day for LA, I took on the mantle with purpose. Over 6 months, I worked with the volunteer team, ArtCenter and other partners to make sure we had a powerful conference that brought a spotlight to the power and importance of IA.

I've been using AI in every way you can think of. It's part of my job to try everything and transfer that back to the PE curriculum where needed - and generally just be as aware of what's happening as possible. Dev-centric apps keep adding chatbots to everything, bolting things onto the same text editor we've always had. And who knows, maybe we won't write code in the future. But I think we will.

The thing that would actually help people become better developers (keep them honing their skills, create more long-term value for a company, and still make good use of AI) isn't another text box - it's a different way to view code. Being able to pull up a feature and automatically pull up all the related code, so you can see exactly how it connects and work on it as a visualized system? That sure seems like a good idea. So I prototyped it.

I've been sequencing MIDI instruments in software since 2001, when I was gifted a stack of synths. I started on Digital Performer and have used all the DAWs, then moved to hardware with the MPC1000. I've had a great time with all of it, but something always irked me. It wasn't until I started thinking in terms of "components" in code and Figma that I began investigating a different way to think about music design.

I met up with Jeff Casimir to talk shop and share insights with Turing's students. We got into how AI is changing things in ways people aren't seeing yet, what employers actually need, and the mistakes I made when I was learning. It's on YouTube.

People traditionally pay six percent in realtor fees to sell a house, mostly because the process is complicated and gated behind a license. The founders came to us with a whiteboard sketch and an ambitious plan: let a homeowner do it themselves, legally, with a licensed realtor handling compliance behind the scenes. I led the research and discovery, then the end-to-end design and build for what would usually cost millions and require a large, focused team.

The Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design (AICAD) is the consortium of the top art and design schools in the country. Each year they hold a symposium to address what's changing in education. I was invited to speak, and my talk, "Untangling Web Design Education," argued that most programs teach tools instead of core universal design and communication foundations - and that we're failing students because of it.

Web designers and developers are building the systems we all have to use. Their work reaches the farthest, with the most serious consequences - yet we expect them to learn through YouTube videos and "watch how I do it" courses. We've arbitrarily separated people into "creatives" and "coders" when what we truly need are well-rounded Designers.

I meet a lot of designers and developers. I'm active in local meetups, I get asked to guest critique (at local colleges), I keep up with the sentiment across forums - so I hear it when people need help. But if you really want to help, you have to talk with the actual human. It might be someone just starting out, or a veteran who's lost in how to present themselves. So I decided to take a proactive approach and just be there for anyone who needed it. Come talk with me during open office hours.

I met up with DonTheDeveloper for a frank discussion about the uncomfortable gap between what junior devs have and what they actually need to be hirable. Between Don and me, we've probably talked to more coding bootcamp students than just about anyone. Is it a teaching issue? Or a change in our culture? Well, it got 50k+ views, so apparently people were curious. It's on YouTube.

A real estate mastermind community had grown from simple group calls to seven patched-together third-party services. They'd proven people wanted it, but it was a mess - separate logins everywhere, no clear sense of what lived where. I worked across the whole product to pull it into one unified social network: research, UX flows, prototyping and testing with users, leading front-end, and handling some unexpected evolution of the visual branding.

When I was learning to code, I was surprised there weren't better tools to show exactly how a variable was used across a longer program. The original idea was already in place at PE, but it was a pain to mark up and maintain. So with the redesign underway, it was the right time to build our ideal tool for authoring our own snippets. It's core to how our "feature" system works - our very targeted, pared-down internal MDN.

Light mode, dark mode, forced-colors, contrast, and animation preferences - can you build universal graphics that behave no matter the context? You know those logos in your email that show up broken, black on black? Situations where branding just feels broken across platforms?

An accessibility-focused company was working on a solution, and I came on to consult and audit what they'd accomplished so far. It's not something a lot of people think about, so I helped build out the education: client-facing material so target companies could understand the technology by interacting with it, plus internal explainers and checklists for the teams we'd be working with.

When PE started, it ran on a very simple drip mechanic. Your goal was to spend 2-3 hours a day on one clearly scoped workshop - no more, no less. Sometimes that shifted a day based on life, but from your cohort's start date, you'd see a new workshop show up in your list each day. It worked. But students and teachers also need to plan around holidays, breaks, and think a little more long-term. So I designed a calendar view that showed each cohort's progress and let us shift things around based on the time of year and how far along a cohort was.

Right after PE's first cohort launched, Don (who's interviewed students from pretty much every coding bootcamp) had me on to explain the idea behind Design for The Web. How are we going to teach coding and visual design together? Is Derek crazy? It was the first time I got to lay out publicly why the two belong in the same curriculum - and I got to make a new friend. Watch on YouTube.

In DFTW (and any PE program), your progress is shown by your ability to complete your projects. You can either do it - or you can't. This cuts out the "Well, am I good enough yet" mentality. Can you make a website - or not? No mystery here. Building that sense of what it means to actually understand something is core to our pedagogy. But we wanted to try building a data-driven Anki-type system and see how people used it.

As a developer, there are usually two roads: you pick something you like and stick with it forever, or you're like me and constantly on the hunt for better ways to organize things. It's important not to rehash things in your practical work, but this is where I've kept my view on CSS documented as a starter for new projects. It's changed a lot over the years, but the core ideas are still the same. If you actually think it all through in layers, you can write clean, clear CSS you understand - instead of consciously trying to avoid it.

Between brand guidelines, the various graphics programs, and the code, there's a gap in naming that everyone just accepts. I thought it was time we talked about it. I'd found that, with very little effort, a whole team can work from clear, semantic type patterns everyone can actually name. It was great working with Geoff Graham and Chris Coyier (a big influence back when I was learning to code) on this piece for CSS-Tricks.

If your curriculum is solid, it really doesn't matter if it's in a fancy LMS or a Google doc or a PDF - the philosophy is what matters. But as things grew, a system started forming. Patterns emerged, and we needed something that could house cross-use resources like key concepts that might be revisited across many workshops or programs. If you're just going to have one big long white page, things are simple - we could have used Markdown/MDX - but we also wanted our site to be a teaching tool. It mattered that everything we taught in DFTW showed up in the actual LMS they were using - the kind of product they'd eventually be building themselves.

While I was creating the first rounds of curriculum for PE, I also needed some work to pay the bills. I ended up on a bunch of Shopify projects with local agencies. I hadn't used Shopify before - but it's basically a CMS for products, right? What it really entailed was learning all the quirks and weird problems. There are a lot! I had to research and design across the full purchase journey - catalog, cart, checkout, post-purchase, returns, retention, coupons, inventory, plugins, and yeah.

The forums were full of drop-shipping noise and nothing for developers, so I founded the Shopify Discord (for developers), which is still going strong today. I learned a bunch about Vue, integrating it within Shopify, building configurators, and helping teams work out new workflows.

There's no real checklist for what it means to be an experienced designer or developer. Bootcamp grads, CS grads, design school, self-taught, seniors ten or twenty years in - nobody shares the same foundations. Everyone means well, but it's tricky. And unfortunately, it can feel like a competition - more about hierarchy than shared goals. Instead of communicating and leveling up together, people retreat into their headphones.

What if there were an established outline for what a foundation would even mean? What if we saw these things as parts of big-picture "design" instead of tools and tasks? What if web designers understood how The Web actually works, and developers stopped pretending color and type were a mystery reserved for only the most "creative" people? I decided to build the path that combines everything you'll need to start your career as an ethical, aware designer for this medium - without spending years chasing your tail.

PXL was an award-winning creative agency (acquired by Studio City in 2020) with big accounts like Universal Pictures and Fox Films, doing tons of fun creative microsites and ad campaigns. I'd known their creative technologist through the Ember meetup, and when she moved up, they needed a senior front-end developer. The first project on my plate was DreamWorks.com - open the dev tools and you'll still see my 2018 code.

After I'd done what I could at Niagen - hired a designer to take over and set the team up - I took a little time off. I did some casual mentoring, and it picked up fast. Next thing I knew, I was a teacher. My wife had just bought a laundromat, so I'd mentor designers and developers from all over the world while helping rehab the washing machines (and learning way too much about laundromats and my own neighborhood). That's where I started building the reusable lesson plans that eventually became Perpetual Education.

Niagen Bioscience (formerly ChromaDex) had a startup-within-a-company building consumer products around NAD+ and cellular health. I was the founding product designer on a tiny design team, working closely with the product owner, the CMO, and the CEO. The science was promising but the clinical trials weren't finished yet, so we couldn't make health claims. I worked with the scientists, doctors, and copywriters on creative ways to tell our story.

My clients so far had all hired me to "build them a website." They weighed the cost like they were buying code - but I was really doing the strategy, the design, the consulting, and the code. In their minds, they'd bring the idea and I'd just build it. In reality, they usually didn't know what they wanted. They had no mental model for how a website actually leads to a measurable change or a clearer goal. So I had to change the relationship, and to do that I had to change how I talked about my job: consulting first, with code as a byproduct.

School Loop (since acquired) built a platform that powers high school websites across the country. Each school needs its own theme: mascot, colors, typography. The core application that generated the sites was Java, and they wanted a CSS expert to come in and audit their entire component architecture. I came in, broke everything down, and worked with everyone on the team to make sure their system was declarative and maintainable.

LA has a ton of great creative agencies, and I was lucky to contract with a few of them - SEW Digital being one. I got to work on a wide variety of project types - data-driven dashboards for Fox Films, interactive games for AAA auto insurance, microsites for companies like Gap, and an educational project about mass incarceration that was presented at the White House. I explored a lot more animation, and even made some music and sound design for a few projects. Every project meant a different team, a different stack, and real deadlines.

ShoutQ's goal was to create the first social media influencer marketplace. I built an Angular prototype so we'd have a live, usable example for investors to play with. This was my first time building a real application, and it was exciting to watch everything I'd learned come together into interactive user interfaces for the first time.

I'd been freelancing and learning as I went, but the goal was always to work at a real design shop. Nouveau Studios was in downtown LA and I got to ride my bike to work. They hired me for my responsive CSS skills, but pretty quickly they started trusting me with more responsibility than my experience probably warranted - research, strategy, project planning, content auditing, client relationships, and business development.

There weren't YouTube tutorials for everything back then. If a client needed a photo gallery, I'd have to figure it out. Video integration? A CMS? Figure it out. It was tough - no flexbox yet, still plenty of cross-browser issues - but I'm really glad I had to just dive in. I got passionate about responsive design right when @media rules started being used, which put me at the edge of that curve and made me notably useful.

After an art-specific magnet school, art college seemed like the next step. I went to CCA (California College of the Arts) assuming I'd become an illustrator - I wanted to work with Barron Storey. But I drifted toward printmaking and painting instead, and ended up with an individualized major. I can't say I was the best student, but I was busy: a lot of Flash, customizing MySpace pages, and interdisciplinary computer classes where I learned Max/MSP and Jitter from some of the guys from Survival Research Laboratories. I was also making a lot of music with synthesizers. So I got to spend five years thinking about composition, typography, and interactivity - and really, what is worth making. All the things that happen to be my job today.