Raft is a small, senior-led studio. Here's the twenty years behind it, and why it's built the way it is.
I spent twenty years building for other people's timelines. An agency of my own first, then Adobe, then Walmart, learning what real design discipline looks like at a scale most founders never see up close.
Then AI changed the water underneath the whole industry. Design and product work now moves faster than any fixed process can track, and it's still moving. A ship is built for one route, built to look permanent, exactly the wrong shape for a current that won't hold still. What I needed to build instead was something that reads the current and adjusts. That's where the name Raft came from, and why it's built to keep momentum when a fixed plan can't.
Read the full story: "Why I Built a Raft, Not a Ship" →
Twenty years of design leadership across brand and product, split between big tech, agency, startup and enterprise work in the U.S. and Japan.
Before leading design at Adobe and Walmart, I ran an award-winning design studio in San Francisco, doing brand and product work for funded startups and Fortune 500s alike. Some of that startup design judgment is still holding up: an IPO, a couple of acquisitions, and several still running growing businesses.
I also led a Tokyo design team for a decade, building Hitachi and ANA Airlines' global brand sites and winning a Good Design Award for Hitachi.com. At Adobe, I built its first international design team, then led AI product design at Adobe Express. Most recently, Design Director at Walmart, shaping AI shopping experiences for 580M monthly visitors.
That cross-market, cross-discipline instinct now drives Raft's flagship work: LegalOn's brand and product platform across seven AI products. I lead every engagement directly. I take on projects like a traditional studio, brand and product through to shipped work, and if needed I can embed as fractional design leadership when a team's scaling and needs senior direction.
Cooper Shields — Chief Happiness Officer.
Attends most meetings. Approves nothing, improves everything.
Designers hand off. Builders wait for specs. Neither is necessary anymore.
Strategy forms in conversation with LLMs before any tool opens. Design and prototype move together, close enough to the real thing to be tested and shared without waiting for engineering. Then Claude Code, Cursor, and V0 turn it into shipped product. No handoff. Five projects live, from a Figma plugin to an interactive art piece built in a day.
See the projects →Time with Claude and ChatGPT thinking through the problem, the user, and the product logic. Writing prompts, pressure-testing ideas, getting to a clear point of view before a single pixel or line of code exists.
Moving between Figma and AI tools to sketch flows, screens, and interactions. Close enough to the real thing to be tested, shared, and iterated without waiting for engineering.
Claude Code, Cursor, and V0 generate and refine working code. The build is directed, not delegated — knowing what you want, knowing when it's right, and knowing how to get there fast.
Ready to move at Raft speed?
→ Download the Raft overview (PDF)