Sees patterns the industry walks past.

I see patterns that most of the industry walks past. It makes me angry that they do — not because I'm special, but because the patterns are right there, and people are charging money not to see them.

I co-run Symbolon Branding. We work with founders whose businesses have outgrown their brands — companies that are real, that have revenue and trajectory, but whose identity is stuck where they were two years ago. The work is strategy-first: understand the business, find the pattern that's already there, build the brand around it. Then execute it through to the end — identity, packaging, web, signage.

Most branding work is decoration sold as strategy. Processes that produce deliverables, not understanding. I take the work more seriously than that. The question isn't "what should your brand look like?" It's "what is your brand actually doing in people's minds, and is it doing what you need it to do?" That question makes the work different.

I'm developing a theoretical framework on how brands form in the human mind. I can't fully explain it yet — I'm honest about that. But the pursuit of it makes my observations sharper than people who stopped asking. When I tell you that a chili pepper on a Mexican restaurant logo is redundant signaling because the name already carries the cultural node, that's not taste. That's pattern-recognition trained by years of chasing the question of what brands actually are.

I've been working in design for 14 years. Before that: mathematics, politics, military service, London, an ice cream shop, a toxic startup, and a decision to become unemployable that turned out to be the best career move I ever made. The through-line has always been the same — look past the surface, find the pattern, build something that holds.

I've been building worlds for 26 years. Brands, systems, games — 140-player live-action campaigns across three cities, a semiotic theory I'm still developing, a productivity coaching practice built from the same instinct. Different materials, same operation. Find the structure that's already there and give it shape.