Designer and creative technologist — twenty years building products, now building tools.
Twenty years of practice spanning interaction design, data visualization, design systems, and information architecture — for products used by millions at Meta, Google, Fidelity, and beyond. Currently building a B2B SaaS platform with Cubiq, a native iOS music environment (Weave), and a shipped Mac application (Shuttlecar). Has taught design at RISD, MassArt, AIB, and Lesley University. Lab work and writing develop separately at aboutface.io. Available for creative-technologist roles, agency partnerships, and consulting.
Current Practice
B2B SaaS Platform — Schema-First
Cubiq · Designer & Architect · Active build with CEO
Designing and building a white-label valet-storage SaaS for operators who offer concierge storage under their own brand. Specified the full system — a thirty-table schema across eleven domains (operators, customers, items, custody chains, billing, equipment, risk, signing, notifications), a four-phase delivery plan, security model, and data migration strategy — before a line of application code was written. The legacy platform took two developers two years; this one runs on Railway for about five dollars a month. The design system is the last thing built, not the first.
Spatial Music Mixer — Weave (iOS)
Independent · One person · 35 days · co-authored with Claude Opus 4.6
Weave started as a question I'd been sitting with since Shapemix: what if a music mixer were spatial? Not a grid of faders, but a field — where position means something, where moving a sound changes how you feel it, not just how you hear it. That's the Mix View at Weave's core: draggable balls on a stage, where X controls pan and Y controls volume; mute a channel by dragging it to the backstage. The metaphor isn't arbitrary — it comes from fifteen years of thinking about cross-modal interaction, a thesis on synaesthesia, and the conviction that music tools could be more embodied than they are.
What I didn't expect was that building it with an AI collaborator would surface a different set of questions entirely. Not vibe coding — that implies something more passive than this felt. Directed collaboration is closer. The model executed, debugged, and occasionally suggested. I decided what the thing was for. Every commit in the Weave git history is co-authored by Claude Opus 4.6. One person, thirty-five days, heading to the App Store. The collaboration that built it will be part of how I talk about it. — notes at aboutface.io
Shuttlecar — Native Mac Application
Independent · Designer & Engineer · Live
A fast, local, opinionated image viewer for Mac. Opens 70+ formats, reads and writes EXIF, strips surveillance metadata before you share. Tags live in plain JSON next to your files — not locked in the app. Designed and shipped end-to-end as a native Swift / AppKit application.
Selected Past Work
AI/ML Workflow & Inline Guidance
Meta · Lead Designer · Ads Audience Expansion
Senior designer for Ads Audience Expansion — a machine-learning workflow that surfaces optimizations across ad campaigns. Introduced inline guidance and AI-powered audience expansion that helped advertisers extend reach and reduce costs, while giving users meaningful control over systems that were previously opaque. Member of the design leadership team for systems standards and workshop practice.
Mobile Trading Platform & Design System
Fidelity Investments · Principal Designer · Flagship Mobile
Led the integration of fractional trading into Fidelity Flagship Mobile — enabling investors to buy portions of high-priced stocks and generating $2M in daily profits on launch. Subsequently led the full redesign of the app and its mobile design system: trading flows, search, quotes, markets, learning, and login.
Data Visualization & Component Library
Google · Designer & DataViz SME · Cloud Monitoring
Led the integration of Stackdriver into Google Cloud Monitoring and built the charting component library for Google Cloud — time series, event charts, data-flow diagrams — enabling developers to interpret complex infrastructure data efficiently. Also designed the Metric Explorer and a calendar component used across Cloud products.
Information Architecture & UX Strategy
Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia · Lead Strategist · Website Redesign
Led UX and information architecture strategy for FRBP's website redesign. Conducted stakeholder interviews and information, data, and accessibility assessments to deliver a structured system that improved user journeys and community engagement across one of the nation's most-visited Federal Reserve sites.
Music-Technology Startup
Shapemix · Founder & Chief Product Officer
Founded and led the company across product, software, content, and design. Raised $2M and launched four iOS apps, including a SPIN Magazine co-branded remixing contest. The platform transformed audio tracks into spatially manipulable shapes — the cross-modal thesis, made real and shipped.
For galleries, screens, and visual case studies of the past work above — Meta, Fidelity, Google, the Federal Reserve, and Shapemix — see design.colin-owens.com ↗. This page is the practice; that one is the picture.
About
Twenty years of practice leaves a particular way of seeing. I came up through interaction design and information architecture when the discipline was still finding its vocabulary — building interfaces for financial products, enterprise tools, advertising platforms, and music technology. Then I founded a company, raised capital, shipped products, and taught.
What I do now is creative-technology work: prototyping, R&D, design and code together, AI in the loop. The foundation under that is the same one that shipped Meta's audience-expansion guidance, Fidelity's mobile design system, and Google Cloud's charting library. Design was never just the deliverable; it was the method.
I'm currently looking for creative-technologist roles at agencies — or partners to start one with. If you're trying to figure out what design and technology look like together when AI is doing the producing, that's the problem I'm working on too.