From Fine Art to Product Design

People are sometimes surprised that before I designed betting apps and healthcare dashboards, I was a fine artist. I spent two years at Cranbrook Academy of Art earning an MFA in 2D Design, showing work in the Mercedes-Benz Selection and at the Detroit Art Book Fair, after a BFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

The move from studio to software looks like a hard pivot from the outside. From the inside, it felt like continuing the same practice with new materials.

Critique built my thick skin — and my ears

Art school runs on critique. You pin your work to a wall, and a room full of smart people tells you what isn't working. After a hundred of those sessions, two things happen: you stop confusing yourself with your work, and you learn to hear the observation inside a harsh comment.

That is, almost exactly, the skill of a good product designer in a stakeholder review or a usability test. When a test participant struggles with a flow I designed, I don't feel attacked — I feel like I'm back in crit, getting free information. The MFA taught me that feedback is material, not verdict.

Studio practice is iteration practice

At Cranbrook there was no syllabus in the conventional sense — just a studio, time, and the expectation that you'd make, evaluate, and remake, endlessly. Version forty of a print doesn't resemble version one, and that's the point.

Product design asks for the same temperament. At Carnegie Mellon's Entertainment Technology Center, my teams built educational apps with real school districts and tested them with real students, week after week. The students didn't care about our intentions; they cared whether the thing made sense in their hands. Iterating without ego was the only way through — and studio practice had already drilled that into me.

Composition is information hierarchy

Every 2D design problem is a hierarchy problem: what does the eye see first, second, third? A screen is no different. When I lay out a dashboard, I'm doing the same work I did composing a print — deciding what deserves visual weight and what must recede. The tools changed from ink to Figma; the judgment is the same.

What I'd tell artists considering the jump

You are not starting over. You're bringing a trained eye, a tolerance for ambiguity, and years of iteration muscle into a field that badly needs all three. What you'll need to add — research methods, collaboration with engineers, thinking in systems and states — is learnable. What you already have is the hard part.