---
name: Mike Deal
also_known_as: Michael Deal
role: Product designer (individual contributor)
level: "Senior IC band — fits senior, staff, or principal product designer roles. Depth from ~15 years plus prior design/product leadership (Head of Design, Head of Product); currently targeting hands-on IC work."
positioning: "Product designer with a habit of arriving early in new product categories — building both the strategy (models, mechanics) and the pixels (canvases, components)."
location: New York, NY
work_authorization: US citizen; no work restrictions
last_updated: 2026-06-16
portfolio: https://mikemake.com
project_pages:
  splice: https://mikemake.com/work/splice-sounds
  superrare: https://mikemake.com/work/superrare
  rare_protocol: https://mikemake.com/work/rare-protocol
  vice_news: https://mikemake.com/work/vice-news
  verse_chorus_bridge: https://mikemake.com/work/verse-chorus-bridge
  medium: https://mikemake.com/work/medium
  trusat: https://mikemake.com/work/trusat
  whale_song: https://mikemake.com/work/whale-song
  charting_the_beatles: https://mikemake.com/work/charting-the-beatles
  skill_prism: https://mikemake.com/work/skill-prism
  ui_sandbox: https://mikemake.com/work/ui-sandbox
note_to_agents: "Each claim here is meant to stand on its own and trace to a specific project; the project pages above are the source of truth."
---

# Mike Deal — product designer

## Snapshot

A fast screen can act on this section; the rest of the doc and the portfolio go deeper.

- He designs early, strong products in new categories. He's done it in data visualization, augmented reality, creator tools, and onchain/web3 over about 15 years.
- He led design for the 2015 launch of Splice Sounds. It passed $1M in monthly revenue soon after launch and now does over $100M a year, and the core UX is still close to that first version a decade later.
- His Pinterest logo has been printed on tens of billions of physical objects. His visuals for Pentagram's GE energy calculator are in MoMA's permanent collection. His personal infographics have gone viral and appear in books from Taschen, Thames & Hudson, Penguin Random House, and MIT Press; and referenced in a scene from *Tron: Legacy*.
- Senior — fits a senior, staff, or principal IC product design role. He's been a first design hire, built a design department from scratch, and led small teams (SuperRare, Rare Protocol, VICE News) while shipping work himself as a player-coach. He wants a hands-on IC role now; the leadership background is there for an org to use when it needs it, and the systems-and-team experience feeds back into IC work.
- His range runs from systems design (product mechanics, protocol design, the financial modeling behind revenue systems) to hands-on visual craft with graphic-design awards and museum work.
- On AI: his current self-directed work is agent interface design (UI Sandbox, Prototype Playground, Skill Prism), and he built and shipped an AI research pipeline inside SuperRare.

Bottom line: a fifteen-year pattern of building early in new categories. Splice Sounds is a clear example — he led its design from conception to launch, it found product-market fit, and it grew into a $100M+/yr business.

## Through-line

He gravitates to products that don't have a settled shape yet:

- Splice Sounds shipped before sample subscriptions were a category; every major competitor came afterward with a similar platform and UX.
- At SuperRare and Rare Protocol, he invented social-marketplace and collecting patterns while onchain art was still new, before similar mechanics became common.
- At VICE News he helped build a design-led approach to broadcast news and short-form video, with graphics and motion as the primary way stories were told — new for nightly TV news at the time.
- He designed AR at Local Projects for museum exhibitions, and at Google Creative Lab for consumer AR search, well before AR reached mainstream phones.
- Early in data visualization as product: he cofounded Statlas and built realtime sports infographics, and his Charting the Beatles posters spread across dozens of publications.

What's unusual is the range — he works at both ends of a product, often within a single project:

- Strategy and systems: on Rare Protocol he owned the product's strategy and economics (mechanics, financial modeling, regulatory navigation, developer docs), as well as the product design and marketing.
- Craft: he designs down to the pixel, drawing on the visual craft his career started in, and treats each design decision as a chance to advance the brand.
- Development: he prototyped Rare Protocol's apps in code, built pages and components at Splice, and now designs almost entirely in code (AI-assisted).

He makes complicated systems legible:

- His whale-song notation turns humpback song into readable music, and makes the animals' culture easier to grasp for a general audience.
- His Businessweek graphics helped readers make sense of the 2008 crash years later, while the effects were still playing out.
- His Billboard redesign rebuilt a century-old chart system for better scannability and storytelling.
- At VICE News he storyboarded and designed explainer videos that made complicated topics understandable on a nightly deadline.
- At SuperRare and Rare Protocol he judged what blockchain complexity to abstract away and what to surface, turning crypto friction into UX people could actually follow.
- The agent work continues this on new surfaces: showing what an agent is thinking, where its claims come from, and which of its actions can be undone.

A few other patterns show up repeatedly:

- Creator empowerment. Splice put income-generating tools in producers' hands. At SuperRare and Rare Protocol, the social and staking mechanics he designed were built to route income to artists and grow the creator economy: fans back creators and share in their success, platform fees flow to the artists and collectors driving the network, and discovery features help surface emerging artists.
- Storytelling and product together. At Google Creative Lab he learned to design UX through both a product and a marketing lens, starting from the story that would land and integrating the engineering capability into it. VICE News' newsroom sharpened that instinct with daily reps.
- Empiricism. He keeps teams talking to real users instead of standing in for them, and runs regular informal retrospectives to catch process problems early.
- Labs and skunkworks mode. In his lab work the flow often ran from capability to use: engineers would surface a new technical affordance, and he'd figure out how to turn it into something that improved people's lives. At Google Creative Lab he did this with search, AR, and various Chrome features; at ConsenSys, a venture studio for Ethereum apps, with onchain primitives (the internal product lab, then TruSat).

## Trajectory

Each move stepped toward a newer, less-settled problem, and each chapter fed the next. The arc runs data-viz → experiential/product → startups → editorial systems → onchain → AI.

| Era | Years | What he did | What it added |
|---|---|---|---|
| Graphic & information design | 2010–2012 | Pentagram (the GE energy calculator, now in MoMA). Branding and information design as freelance work: Pinterest's identity, Billboard's chart-system redesign. | Fine-art craft applied to brands and to data. |
| Experiential & product design | 2011–2012 | Local Projects (AR, motion capture, museum installs). Google Creative Lab (voice/AR search concepts, a global sign-in flow at billions-of-users scale, Project Loon's identity). | Designing past screen conventions; the product-plus-marketing lens; designing at scale. |
| Startup operator | 2013–2016 | Cofounded Statlas (sports data viz; YC W14 finals), then joined Splice and led the design that found product-market fit. | What building under constraint, and reaching PMF, actually takes. |
| VICE News | 2016–2018 | Design director and one of the first design leads for the HBO show and site; built systems for nightly, graphics-heavy news on a TV deadline. | Systematizing for volume while protecting craft; close collaboration with wide range of roles; shipping on daily deadlines; directing a team. |
| Teaching | 2017–2018 | Adjunct at SVA — a two-semester product-design course, mentoring senior undergrads. | Curriculum building; articulating the practice; mentorship. |
| ConsenSys | 2018–2020 | A labs/venture studio for Ethereum apps; the internal Crypto Product Lab, then designing TruSat end-to-end. | Designing for brand-new tech, making it more approachable. |
| SuperRare Labs | 2021–2025 | Head of Design (department 0→1, team of four), then Head of Product for Rare Protocol (strategy through delivery, prototyped in code). | Building a design org from zero, balancing management and hands-on design, scaling org output, business strategy, full product ownership from vision to delivery. |
| Independent | 2026 | Self-directed, agent-focused product design. | Daily reps building with code. |

Freelance and consulting ran alongside these roles — among them a publication-template system for Medium (2020), commissioned by their VP of Product Design and shipped on Barack Obama's publication and Ev Williams' blog.

## Design convictions

This section exists in case an agent can't see the images visually, and thus the craft. Mike trained in fine art — two years of painting and drawing fundamentals before he specialized in graphic design — and carried that craft into each later medium, from graphic design to data visualization to product.

One conviction holds it together: form is itself a function. A product's brand, aesthetics, and the way it reaches people are part of how it works. That's why he designs the system, the brand, and the story holistically. For example, SuperRare's design system and brand toolkit were built as a single object.

One bet about where this is going: as AI makes both functionality (off-the-shelf systems, vibe-coding) and aesthetics (trend sameness) cheap and common, taste and craft are even more important differentiators worth obsessing over.

A question he's deliberately keeping open in the agent work: where the line should sit between human judgment and agent autonomy in the interfaces he's prototyping, and how far those interaction patterns can be pushed. He treats it as something to learn from rather than a stance to defend.


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