About

Philip Michael Jones. Father, husband, painter, former diesel mechanic, and product designer with 25 years of experience. These aren't separate identities, they inform each other constantly. The mechanic diagnoses before he fixes. The artist feels before he explains. The designer serves before he expresses.

I went to fine art school and studied drawing, painting, photography, and printmaking. That foundation never left. I moved into communication arts and eventually into product design, where I now work at the intersection of Product Design Operations and Design Systems Engineering. The throughline across all of it is the same: understanding a problem deeply before touching a solution.

I love what I do. That is not a throwaway line. Creating and building things for a living is a responsibility I take seriously, and the work reflects that.

How I work

When I walk into a new project, I go deep before I go anywhere. I want to hear what the client believes the problem is. I want to talk to the people who actually use the thing being built. I want to see what exists today and assess it firsthand. I want to understand what else is out there, not just what's similar, but what's best in class, whatever the category, because the best interface personality rarely comes from looking only within your own lane.

All of those inputs matter. The larger picture only comes into focus when you have all of them.

Accessibility

Accessibility is not a best practice I follow. It is a responsibility I believe in.

Everyone deserves the same consideration for their experience. That means color contrast that works for people with low vision or color differentiation challenges. It means keyboard navigation that doesn't require a mouse. It means metadata on images so that screen readers can describe what's there to someone who cannot see it. It means type that is readable, layouts that are navigable, and interactions that do not exclude.

I push for AAA compliance not because it's on a checklist, but because the people who need it are real, and they deserve products that work.

Skills

I solve problems. The tool I use to solve them is the one that best fits the problem.

I translate between disciplines. User needs, business goals, engineering constraints, and what the design actually needs to do for the person using it.

I lead design from the front, whether that means individual contribution or directing a team.

I research first. Opinion follows evidence.

I build systems that scale, not one-off solutions that create more problems downstream.