Hi, I’m Jesse Gardner. I care a lot about helping people learn about and do good with technology.
I’ve been doing full-stack web design and development for over 20 years. I specialize in user experience design, technical strategy, front-end development, and design systems.
I’m currently the Director of User Research for New York State, helping improve the UX of the state’s digital services and applications through user research and design systems.
I think a lot about design systems and write about them over at Practical Design Systems. I started as a designer and pivoted to engineering, so I’m always trying to find ways to connect the dots between the two.
Before NYS, I served as a VP of Technology at Fox, where I migrated several large media sites to their own custom content platform, managed several client teams, and helped launch Fox Weather. Before that, I worked at Simply Recipes, designing and helping grow one of the world’s most trusted food blogs, and at AMC Networks, helping build a unified content platform for all of the company’s channels. I’ve also helped clients like Asurion, Boeing, and Harvard with various design and development challenges.
Interested in working together? Drop me a line.
Addendum: I currently live in Upstate NY with my wife and four kids. When I’m not designing websites, I tend to my hobby farm, makes candles with my wife, snap landscape photos, and promote empathy through storytelling. I also write (infrequently) about faith, technology, and politics on my blog.