Michael Deal
Product designer, systems nerd, building new things in code
Designing end to end, strategy to pixels. Track record at the front of new product categories: dataviz → AR → creator platforms → web3. Shipping fast, obsessing over craft, and kicking soccer balls.
Experience
- Built Rare Protocol into its own product line with a small team (1 PM, 2 engineers). Sole designer — prototyped in code (thanks Claude). Owned strategy, design, and delivery.
- Conceived + designed Rare Rewards — protocol features routing platform fees back to community members driving the network.
- Designed Creator Staking — fans back the creators they believe in early and share in their success. Shipped before similar patterns appeared widely.
- Built an AI-powered research pipeline — interview transcripts, support tickets, and social channels feeding a tagged database used across product and marketing.
- Shipped a creator discovery app — live activity feed + game-like mechanics that reward spotting emerging artists early.
- Wore every other hat required: financial modeling, vendor management, regulatory navigation, developer docs.
- First design hire at the platform that sparked the onchain art movement. Built the design department 0→1 — culture, process, systems — personally designing daily, while mentoring a team of 4.
- Invented new art collecting formats and marketplace patterns that reoriented the platform around social.
- Built a design system and brand toolkit that multiplied output — engineers prototyping without mockups, marketing shipping on-brand assets independently.
- Iterated relentlessly on core flows — turned clunky blockchain friction into smooth UX that drove traffic and sales.
- Helped steer the company through repeated pivots, using design to make options concrete.
- Product design, strategy, and creative direction for a skunkworks team building consumer apps onchain. End-to-end IC role: research, prototyping, marketing.
- Designed and shipped TruSat — a citizen-science app crowdsourcing satellite tracking data from stargazers worldwide. Shaped the product across multiple iterations.
- Co-directed an award-winning team of art directors, data journalists, animators, and illustrators. Hands-on throughout — scripting, storyboarding, designing, and animating alongside the team.
- Co-built a design system spanning TV and web that enabled teams to publish visual content daily and deliver 25 minutes of graphics-rich video to HBO every weeknight.
- Designed vicenews.com. Supervised build and launch.
- Art directed Verse Chorus Bridge — animating 30 musician interviews to visualize the layers of their songs.
- Led product and design for Splice Sounds from concept to launch. It found product-market fit and became a $100M+/yr business, used by millions of producers, still built around the core UX loop I shipped.
- Shipped features across Splice's creator tools — hands-on in the codebase, building pages and components, iterating from usage data.
- Cofounded and launched a visual news platform for sports — real-time infographic updates pairing game data with crowdsourced and auto-generated annotations.
- Presented product at Y Combinator, advanced to final interviews.
- Designed new product concepts for Google's ecosystem — including voice and AR-based search solutions and a global sign-in experience.
- Initiated pitches for Chrome campaigns, including a sonic identity system for Chromebooks. Co-designed Project Loon's brand identity.
- Designed multi-sensory experiences for physical spaces — game design, AR, motion capture, touchscreen walls, projection mapping.
- Developed award-winning experiences for Cleveland Museum of Art, and pitch-winning concepts for Smithsonian's NMAAHC.
- Distilled complex datasets into simple architecture and UX for brands and cultural institutions.
- Illustrated visuals for GE's household energy calculator, now in the MoMA design collection.
Teaching
Developed and taught a two-semester product design course — workshops, assignments, lectures, guest speakers, portfolio reviews, career mentoring.
Education
Full-time immersive in full-stack web development — building and shipping apps end to end: Ruby, Python, JavaScript, HTML/CSS, SQL, Git, and the era's standard MVC frameworks. Where building in code first took hold.
Two years of painting and drawing fundamentals before specializing in graphic design — craft carried into every medium since, with the conviction that form is itself a function.
Recognition