Five years of interaction design across museum-tier interactives at Bluecadet, an AR installation at Drexel, an iOS design system at SETVI, agency web at Defy, and ed-tech at K-12 scale at Newsela.
Brendan Russo · 2019
I'm a formally trained UX/UI designer who writes the frontend that ships. The seam between design intent and rendered behavior is where most digital products lose their edge.
The work has lived in unusual neighborhoods. An 8-foot AR installation in a university lobby that drew 138 voice drops on launch night. A five-tier iOS design system that covered ~80% of a B2B app's screens before it shipped. A website for a Philadelphia branding agency that lifted ad and email response to its highest numbers post-launch. Frontend on experience design for museums and cultural institutions. And now a K-12 ed-tech platform serving roughly 47 million learners.
The throughline isn't a discipline. It's an attention to the seam. Where a system meets a story. Where a wireframe becomes behavior. Where a room turns into a screen.
Product design at K-12 scale: differentiated reading content, instructional tools, and assessment surfaces used daily in nearly nine out of ten US schools. The constraint isn't beauty. It's differentiation across reading levels, teacher signal-to-noise, and kid-comprehension under five seconds of attention.
The original 2020 rebrand had a confusing dual-column layout, navigation scattered across all four viewport corners, and "easter egg" links hiding contact paths. I owned the rebuild end-to-end: sitemap → gray-box wireframes → mid-fi with placeholder type and brand → high-fi with gradients, stickers, pill components, and marquee ribbons → Figma handoff with annotated PDF specs documenting every animation behavior. Post-launch ad and email response rates reached the highest numbers the agency had run.
Defy · rebuilt site · desktop
Frontend on experience design across museums, cultural institutions, and universities. Bluecadet's work appears at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's 81st Street Studio, the MIT Museum's Essential MIT, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Museum of the American Revolution, the National Building Museum, and NASA's Data Lens, among others. The work is the rare frontend role where the page lives on a 10-foot touchscreen in a room people walked into on purpose.
An 8-foot vinyl-wrapped wooden Drop Zone, four panels around a steel beam, paired with a mobile camera-based AR app for recording and placing voice messages spatially in the lobby. Research: 70% of surveyed Drexel students reported feeling disconnected from peers outside their classes; 90% wanted improved academic-community connection. Outcomes: 138 voice drops recorded within hours of launch; 200+ submissions sustained across the 3-month exhibition; unanticipated usage patterns from professors, security personnel, students, including countdowns, podcasts, and hidden placements that were never designed for.
Talkdrop · social-object render · URBN lobby
Built an iOS design system on Brad Frost's atomic-design hierarchy, atoms (icons, palette, type), molecules (buttons, switches, forms), organisms (nav, menus, popups, line items, tables), templates (covering ~80% of app screens), pages (the remaining 20% requiring custom consideration). The system increased designer productivity, gave developers consistent components to ship against, and turned what had been one-off design hand-offs into a shared inventory.
SETVI · atomic-design system · iOS
Sole designer on Brinker's complete brand redesign at Defy. Muted palette, classic serif paired with a solid sans, strong shapes, a wealth-management visual system designed to read as trustworthy without going generic-financial. Ads, pamphlets, presentation and document templates, brand system guidelines. The client passed on the redesign in the end, but the system is still the strongest version of itself.
Brinker · brand identity mockup
My background is split: formally trained UX/UI on one side, frontend on the other. That split sounds like a job description, but in practice it's an instrument. When I wireframe, I'm already running the implementation in my head, what the markup looks like, where the animation lives, which states the system has to hold. When I write the frontend, I'm still designing, the boundary between layout and behavior, the difference between a transition that explains and one that just decorates.
I have been a student of visual design my whole life. I believe everything can be made to look aesthetically beautiful, so why shouldn't it be?Brendan Russo · brendan-russo.com
The flip side: functionality is equally, often more, important than visual appearance. A pretty page that doesn't ship its job is a failure of both disciplines, not just one. The work I do best is when those two pressures land on the same rendered surface.
Atomic systems for iOS. Sitemap-first IA for agency web. Annotated animation specs in PDF for dev handoff. Frontend on physical museum installs. Voice-AR localization in a campus lobby. Differentiated reading content for K-12 students who haven't decided whether reading is interesting yet. Different surfaces, same instinct: find the seam, design the seam, ship the seam.
Date ranges approximate · full work history on request
Open to interaction-design work that lives at the seam, product, brand, install, system, or somewhere stranger. Currently at Newsela; available for select side work, advisory, or future full-time conversations.