Brandon E. B. Ward.

I'm Brandon. I've spent my career building and running design practices: at four startups in the early 2000s, two design and digital agencies in the middle stretch, a senior consulting run after that, and at Precocity for the last decade. The throughline is that every one of those jobs began with the same sentence: there is no UX/SD/design practice yet; build one.

The first startup was an e-learning organization I salvaged from dilution when the Director of Production abruptly quit, building the team, bringing everything in-house. The second was a small e-commerce platform where I learned to ship in a small room with engineers who outranked me and a CEO who wanted to sue me to stay when I left. The third was an early-to-market video search platform with all the promise and an unscrupulous CEO. The fourth taught me that products that lead with great design with the users in mind backed up by quality software is worth millions.

The agency years were the years I learned to run a creative team. The consulting years after were the ones where I learned to run a creative team inside a business that didn't think of itself as a creative one. At Precocity I joined as the first UX hire and spent ten years growing the practice into the discipline that closes the firm's enterprise contracts. That case study is the load-bearing piece on this site. Read it if you read nothing else.

During that run I was retained as the UX and user-research expert witness in FTC v. Match.com. That's the kind of work that only exists when the practice is taken seriously. Alongside the day job I co-founded the Dallas chapter of the Service Design Network, which has grown to roughly 5,000 members, and won the bid to host its 2025 global conference.

The AI-era expression of the same instinct, for me, has been shipping my own tools:

• Speakeazy (live, real users)
• FORGE (a content-driven, AI-powered IA, UX, UI, and Build tool)
• Verity (a comprehensive UX Research platform)
• RAD (a visualization and reporting tool for moderated usability studies)
• Marksman (a MacOS Markdown converter mini-app Precocity uses internally for AI projects)
• Design Library Showcase Generator (a Figma plugin to help you instantly create a showcase of all library components and their variants)

The tools matter to me less as products than as proof. I don't believe a design leader who hasn't shipped anything with their own hands in five years. Maybe it was a painting, or a teapot, or a chair, or an app. The medium is different than it was in 2001. The discipline isn't.

The short version: I build design practices from scratch, or take existing teams, turn them up to 11, and run them across every mode. That means strategy, creative direction, hands-on production. Unlike most leaders at my level, I'm still shipping in the new tools every week.

I live in Dallas. I write here periodically. I love kung fu, classic cars, singing, acting, teaching, traveling, husbanding, and fathering.