brand & design systems leader · ai product designer
Design standards, component libraries, production workflows — and for the last five years, the AI layer that makes them move. My proof isn't a slide deck: it's a working agentic OS that runs my studio, audits my claims, and occasionally catches me exaggerating.
DavidOS is the operating system I built for my own life. It runs my studio, keeps my family's calendar straight, tracks the goals I'm actually trying to hit, and handles the production work that used to eat my evenings — so one person can operate like a team.
Under the hood: 83 small AI agents, each with a written job description — what it may read, what it may write, what it must never do. Anything that leaves the machine waits for my approval. Anything that describes me has to cite a source. That's the part worth paying attention to — not that AI does the work, but that it's built so I can trust what it does.
If you're reading this wondering whether your team could run this way — smaller headcount, faster output, nothing shipped unreviewed — that's exactly what I help people build. work with me →
// what governed actually means — from this week's run logs
Every public artifact — portfolio, case study, bio — is blocked at export unless each claim traces to a dated source file. Audit result: PASS required.
Caught silently truncating 76% of its results while reporting success — rebuilt to disclose every dropped item, with 39 regression tests. Silence is now a failure state.
Portfolio instrument that refuses to write its own report if the prose drifts into advice language. Refusal as a designed feature.
Caught a marketing metric my own website overstates — flagged, held, and removed from every artifact until reconciled. Truth has a schema.
huntington national bank · current
GitHub Copilot workflows that translate Figma designs into responsive, ADA-conscious Salesforce Marketing Cloud HTML — turnaround from days to hours, with accessibility and compliance review intact. Sitecore Content Hub taxonomy and governance for 200+ marketing assets, so a distributed team ships from one system.
days → hours
mantium · enterprise genai
Owned product design for an enterprise GenAI platform. Designed the onboarding flows and interaction patterns that took a new enterprise customer's first deployment from 2+ hours to under 30 minutes.
2h → 30min read the case study →
cardinal health · healthcare
Personalized Adobe Experience Manager experiences for healthcare professionals; 15% conversion lift through systematic Adobe Target testing.
+15% conversion read the case study →
kahle nutrition · local practice
Strategic UX and web development — brand, site, and booking flow for a local nutrition practice, built to run without a webmaster.
brand → live read the case study →
arloa · 0-to-1
Brand identity, design system, web, and acquisition flows for a four-person team — then a Claude Code content workflow that took output from 4 to 12+ pieces a month.
3× output read the case study →Not mockups — running software and real artifacts, designed by me and produced through DavidOS pipelines. This is what "working with AI" actually looks like when the taste stays human and the production system does the lifting.
I'm David — a designer in Columbus, Ohio who builds brands, design systems, and the AI-enabled production workflows behind them. Everything on this site, including the OS that wrote half the run logs, is working proof.
Brand identity and design systems; AI-assisted content and design-to-code pipelines with human review gates built in. Scoped projects, honest timelines.
engagements run through Skelton Media — my studio since 2008
david@skeltonmedia.com → full-time · senior / staffRemote-first teams building AI products that need design leadership with real systems experience — someone who has governed agents, not just prompted them.
linkedin/skeltonmedia →Everything I've published, on 4 shelves. Squarespace-era posts migrated; new field notes and process pieces ship from the OS itself.
Written from inside the OS — each one from something that actually happened in the system that week.
The most important function in my portfolio agent throws an error when output starts sounding like advice. Designing the boundary before the feature.
2 min readEvery claim I make about my own work now traces to a dated source file — or it doesn't ship. On building a claim ledger for the person you market: yourself.
2 min readBuilding a Robinhood agent that proposes and never executes — prompts, guardrails, and why the approval loop is the product.
9 min read
Longer arguments about where knowledge work, agents, and design are heading.
I shipped a complete product vision as a folder of files any AI can build from. On provider-agnostic systems, and why the file is the interface that survives.
4 min read
06-12
Knowledge management was never the goal. Why I'm building an agentic operating system instead of another notes app.
5 min read
06-12
Files made sense when humans were the only readers. On moving from documents you organize to context a system can act on.
5 min read
06-12
Between the engineer and the end user there's a new job: the person who deploys, governs, and owns agents in production.
3 min read
Applied AI in real brand, content, and product work — with the numbers.
Redesigning Huntington Bank's highest-traffic conversion pages — homepage, checking navigation, product flows — with legal, brand, and compliance at the table.
2 min read
08-18
Mantium let enterprises build secure AI chat on their own data, no code. A new customer's first deployment averaged 2+ hours; we got it under thirty minutes.
3 min read
08-18
Modernizing the Order Express dashboard pharmacy customers rely on — inside brand, CMS, and compliance constraints of a regulated enterprise.
2 min read
08-18
A health practice with no website became one patients can find, trust, and book — strategy, design, launch, and the technical plumbing.
2 min read
08-18
Arloa helps parents of children with special needs manage IEPs and school communication. Product, brand, and go-to-market — from idea to launch.
2 min read
06-12
What Mantium taught me about making model capability legible to people who will never read a prompt guide.
2 min read
06-12
The Claude Code content pipeline behind Arloa — 4 to 12+ pieces a month without adding headcount, and without losing the brand.
2 min read
The process posts — briefs, iterations, refusals, and how the outputs actually got made.
I picked a typeface for a website and ended up re-typesetting an operating system — including the contrast failure I couldn't see by eye.
3 min read
07-30
A game-day sideline board built as data plus a renderer — how the same content-in-files pattern behind DavidOS handles live cards.
1 min read
07-30
Rebuilding a military patch archive with an agent pipeline: research, redraws, and a render script that turns markdown records into a browsable site.
3 min read
07-30
This site is generated from markdown by the same system it describes. The build script, the content rules, and why there's no CMS.
2 min read