I’m Vernard. 👋🏽 Filipino-American, based in Massachusetts. I came up through arts and design and fell into web development as a teenager. I’ve been in tech since 2006 and worn most of the hats since: multimedia producer, graphic designer, web developer, frontend engineer, and UX designer.
I started in multimedia and 3D, then worked through PHP, WordPress, ASP.NET, React, and TypeScript before UX became the actual job in 2017. Users were bailing on a broken registration flow, I finally had a real problem to point my training at, and that was that. Now I’m a hybrid UX designer and frontend engineer. I run design systems with real governance, and my Figma maps cleanly to component architecture, so handoff to engineering stops being a translation problem.
Most of my UX years have been public sector: the US Air Force and the California Department of Public Health. I led the design system for the USAF Shadow Operations Center, ran a full frontend migration on Iron Bank’s Vulnerability Assessment Tool for Platform One, and built CDPH’s first shared design system from zero on CAIRHub. These days I run my own consultancy, Logias, leading with accessibility and Section 508 auditing. Clients so far include EDMO, Burger King, and Niantic on Pokémon GO.
My favourite part of the whole thing is still visual design. The moment an idea stops being a conversation and starts looking real in Figma. Outside work it’s family, cooking, guitar, and sim racing, which is probably why I like systems, feedback loops, and anything that behaves better once it’s tuned properly.