Brooklyn, NY · 2026
davidbean
Design engineer. I research it, design it, then build it, so nothing gets lost in the handoff.
Co-founder of SNACKS. Before that, Principal Product Designer at Meta, Senior Interaction Designer at Bloomberg, and a decade of agency work. This is a deck, not a site. It runs on Snacks Slides, the deck engine I built, and everything in it is a real thing you can use.
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Great work stalls in the gap between design and engineering. I stopped standing on one side of it.
For fifteen years I designed things and handed them to people who built them. Some of it survived the trip. The parts that mattered most, the timing, the states, the feel of a thing in your hand, rarely did.
Since 2025 I build what I design. Not prototypes: products with accounts, app-store listings, billing, and users who complain. The person with the design intent is the person shaping the build. That is the whole idea, and everything after this slide is evidence.
I have described myself four ways. The last one is the first one, again.
Then Paul and I started SNACKS. Small by design.
SNACKS is the studio Paul Petrowsky and I co-founded. Six senior people, each of us used to being the one in the room with nobody above to escalate to. We treat every layer of a business as a design problem: brand, product, ops, go-to-market, built with the same care by the same people.
Paul and I both spent years at Meta as Principal Product Designers, him on Central Integrity and Support, me on Central Privacy, Enterprise Tooling, and Developer Experiences. Before that, a dozen agency years each, some of them side by side. SNACKS puts both kinds of muscle to work in one place. Brooklyn and Chicago, Eastern time, mostly.
- DirectNo layers between you and the work. Most of what slows a studio down is internal; we skip all of it. Your point of contact is a person doing the work.
- CompressedAI moves the speed. We move the standard. Cycles that took weeks take days, and a daily trivia game went from first sketch to two app stores and the web in seven weeks. Senior review on everything that ships; client work stays out of model training.
- EmbeddedWe work within, not just with. Slack channels, standups, the messy middle. Not consultants delivering a deck. Partners shipping with you.
- Three layersDesign, strategy, operations. Some of it is the six of us, some is a bench of senior specialists we have already shipped with. The standard is the same either way.
We gave ourselves the brief. Figma to two app stores in seven weeks.
A daily trivia game with real accounts, push notifications, anonymous play, server-side question generation, moderation, leaderboards, and streaks. The unglamorous production plumbing, not a demo reel.
- The ruleEverything the app should be lived in living spec documents: product rules, database contracts, design tokens, a running decision log. Every session began by reading them.
- Web firstIterate fast on a Next.js build, lock the behavior, then port the proven flows to Expo and React Native for the stores. One backend served both.
- By subtractionIt started as a live, race-the-clock game, until we watched people fail to coordinate a thirty-second window. So: an async daily puzzle with hints that build tension. A clever auto-elimination mechanic tested as confusing, so it went.
- FeedbackTwo months of friends and family before public launch, and still. Their reactions drive what changes next. AI builds the changes; it does not get to choose them.
Today’s puzzle, live from production. No account needed. Your guesses count.
Blue plus yellow has to make green. Concept to a refined live game in two days.
One named target color a day. Squeeze pigment onto a palette, swirl it with your finger, serve when it looks right. The stir is not decoration: the mix only reveals itself as you stir, and you cannot serve until it is actually mixed.
Under it: hand-rolled Kubelka-Munk pigment mixing over six spectral bands, a WebGL2 paint field with smudge advection and gloss, Taptic-Engine haptics on the web, and a leaderboard refereed by a server that recomputes every score from the pour weights, so no phone can lie.
- PivotIt began as a glowing-lights composition game. I built it, played it for an hour, and redirected to paint the same day. The lights renderer is parked, not deleted.
- RejectedFree-slip walls v1 damped everything and deadened the feel. Gone. v2 kills only the outward velocity at the rim, so strokes glide along it.
- RemovedA tester reset on the wordmark wiped a real day when tapped by accident. Removed everywhere.
Try the math
Long-press a tube to pour. Swirl with your finger or mouse. One serve a day; after that the palette is yours.
The product is the process. Designers ship templates in Figma; clients edit words, never structure.
A frame named template_home with layers named slot:headline becomes an editable, publishable page. Clients change text and images inside slots the designer defined. The design intent is protected by the system itself, not by a style guide someone has to remember.
AI works inside the same guardrails: drafting copy, auditing a page against the brand kit, generating imagery, always anchored to the brand and checked after it generates. Every publish commits content to the site’s own git repo and CI rebuilds it, so a client can leave with a working copy any day they like.
- Built inAbout two weeks for the working platform: Next.js, Neon Postgres, Clerk, Stripe, Netlify CI, a Figma webhook. Ten tenants publish through it.
- IngestionPaste a repo and the platform works out what it is. An annotated hand-built site imports one template per page shape, with an AI pass that proposes the annotations as a draft PR for a human to review.
- No lock-inOne button exports a standalone, client-owned repo with design, content, and images vendored in. Trust is easier to earn when leaving is easy.
- Next slideA working slice of the editor, with the AI on. Go break it.
Show me the sentence a real person said.
Interview transcripts, sync notes, Slack days, design audits, ten transcribed videos: the raw material of a discovery engagement, turned into typed findings, opportunity themes, decision records, and evidence-cited briefs. Every claim points at a verbatim quote. If the quote is not an exact substring of the source, the system refuses to store it.
Built for a live engagement in about ten days: a Python pipeline with 145 tests, a React workspace with zero added runtime dependencies, and five invariants enforced in code and by database triggers. Internal text never leaves studio hardware unscrubbed. Local models read the raw material; frontier models do the synthesis, on scrubbed text only; the result comes back to the machine and gets its names back before our team takes it into artifact generation.
Try the verbatim gate
- Raw materialTranscripts, sync notes, a Slack channel, design audits, video. Local models only.
- Typed findingKind, salience, and a quote that must be an exact substring of its chunk, checked on write and again by a trigger.
- ScrubEverything is scrubbed before synthesis; nothing leaves the machine with names on it.
- SynthesisFrontier models on scrubbed text only. Themes, decisions, and briefs each cite finding ids; zero citations fails.
- Back on the machineThe names come back client-side, and our team takes the cited result into artifact generation.
Every deck is a URL. You are inside one right now.
Snacks Slides began as a 546-line vanilla deck engine built for one pitch: any HTML page becomes a horizontal deck with a hover minimap of live thumbnails, present and blackout modes, a deep link per slide, and print that gives you one slide per page. This portfolio runs on it. So does the SNACKS studio pitch.
Then it grew into the product upstream of the engine: decks as data, templates with named slots, brand kits, an editor with the filmstrip along the bottom, and pptx import that keeps the canvas its author made. Live at slides.snacks.design, free, with the same tools we use ourselves.
- Slots, not a blank canvasTemplates protect the design the way slots do in Snacks Sites. Drag never means freeform-anywhere by default; the guardrails are the product.
- Faithful importA .pptx comes in as the canvas its author made, run weights and SmartArt included, never forced into a template. If a slide cannot be made faithful, it says so and imports it anyway.
- Own the deckStudio and client decks publish git-backed, so a deck is a repo the client can keep. The public tier stores the same JSON and serves it as a URL.
- Try it herePress F to present. Hover the bottom edge for the map. Print this page and you get one slide per sheet.
A fresh copy of the demo deck, saved only in your browser. Edit anything, add a slide, press F to present it. Nothing you do here touches anyone else's deck.
Privacy tooling at Meta scale. Under NDA, so walk around and ask people.
I designed the tooling and cross-team workflows Meta used to respond to privacy regulation: first to make the response faster, then to automate the parts that did not need a person. Less about screens than about process: who has to agree, in what order, with what evidence, and how a tool carries that without becoming a bottleneck itself.
I cannot show the work. I can let you meet the people. Every conference room is booked; that part is not a joke.
More than twenty years of the first half of the sentence. Then the second half.
- SNACKS, Co-founder2025 onward. A design-engineering studio: client work and our own products, shipped with coding agents. Snacks Trivia, Swirl, Sites, Slides, and the Client Portal, all on the slides before this one.
- Meta, Principal Product Designer2021 to 2024. Privacy tooling and the cross-team workflows behind regulatory response. The chapter on the previous slide.
- Bloomberg, Senior Interaction Designer2020 to 2021. Enterprise tooling and developer experience in a dense, keyboard-first world.
- Dom & Tom, Director of UX2015 to 2021, from design lead to running a team of six. Built the UX practice and its process; proudest of every designer I hired and mentored. The signature project was LECET: thirty user interviews across regional offices, three personas, four experience principles, and a component system that carried web, iOS, Android, and a political-action extension for years.
- Code and Theory, Senior UX Designer2014 to 2015. The Huffington Post redesign, and service design for the launch of Xfinity Mobile alongside Comcast and IDEO.
- OpenSky, UI Engineer, then Interaction Designer2011 to 2013. The chapter this whole deck rhymes with.
Also true
Two gold and one silver Addy, a silver Davey. Certified ScrumMaster. Hunter College, photography. Clients along the way: Bloomberg, Meta, Huffington Post, Xfinity Mobile, BMW, Comcast, Dick’s Sporting Goods, NYU, General Electric, CNN, Gemini, Chase.
What I want next
A senior individual-contributor role where design and engineering are the same job, on a team shipping real products to real people. New York, or a team that does not mind where I sit.