A craft built for change.

Small by design.

We help startups and established companies turn new ideas into brands and products people trust and want to use. Every engagement is led directly by founder and design leader Lance Shields. That keeps the work close and the conversations honest, from strategy through build.

The experience behind Raft spans more than twenty years with Adobe, Walmart, Hitachi, and startups that went on to IPO and acquisition. That work includes global brands, new product launches, and platforms used by millions of people.

We also use AI every day. It helps us explore more ideas and make them real sooner. But moving faster is not the same as knowing where to go. Technology helps us make. People decide what matters.

Why a raft

Companies rarely come to us when the route is obvious. Usually they're launching something new or trying to bring their brand and product back together. A ship is built for a known route. A raft is lighter. It responds to the water underneath it and keeps moving when conditions change.

That felt like the right kind of studio to build.

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.

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.