While you're here, have a look at my resume.
Download ResumeJustin Zagar · product designer who builds
Each time in a new language, for a harder problem, because the problem never changed: somebody was doing by hand what a system should have been doing for them.
A district with eight schools and no way for any of them to change their own pages. I was seventeen and still a student there. So I built a form: the school secretary filled in the principal's name, the phone number, the start and end times as radio buttons holding the three real answers, and it wrote the page back out. Two weeks start to finish. It cost nothing. Then I ran a session every month for any teacher who wanted to come, which is where the design actually got tested, because you find out very quickly which label is wrong when you are watching eight people fail at the same field.
Read the case study →Rewritten in ASP.NET about three weeks after I came back to the district. It opened on a screen the first version never needed: Choose a site below to begin your editing session. One login across many sites, each showing when it was last updated, with a preview step before publishing. That is the version that outlived the school district. Through my freelance years the same bones got re-skinned client after client.
The first one that shipped to somebody who was not a school. It went live on 22 December 2006, managing thirty pages of a national car rental company's public website. I know the exact date because the software recorded it itself, and those rows are still in the database twenty years later.
Read the case study →
Not a website. A reusable application shell (login, session security, a status and error library, roles, chrome) with per-client feature modules dropped into it. The proof it was a platform rather than a one-off is mechanical: across two completely unrelated deployments those shell files are byte-identical. The same codebase ran a rental brand's customer complaint system and a sweepstakes back office.
Read the case study →The productized one. It had a name in the browser title bar, two logotypes I drew, a version number printed in the chrome, and five releases. Around twenty client sites over six years, white-labeled so the client's logo sat at the top and mine went in the footer. The admin files are byte-identical across unrelated clients, which is what makes it a product with a deployment procedure rather than a folder I copied around.
Read the full teardown →
One wheel record becomes a finished eBay and WooCommerce listing in minutes instead of hours. It has run the business for fourteen years, and a second retailer licensed it and ran it as a paying customer on their own tenancy. Same conviction as the school form in 2002, aimed at a harder problem.
Read the case study →AllOEMRims is winding down. The conviction is not. I am still doing the same thing: finding the work that repeats, building the system that absorbs it, and handing the controls to whoever is closest to the job.
I never copied the code forward. Every one was rebuilt from scratch, in whatever language the era gave me. What carried was the judgment: find the work that repeats, build the system that absorbs it, and hand the controls to the person closest to the job.
24 sites and applications I built between 1999 and 2012, running right now. Not screenshots. The original code, transpiled and served, with the real records swapped for invented ones. Open one and use it: fill in the forms, sign into the admin behind it, break something. It is your own copy, and nobody else ever sees what you do in there.
Thirty years of it, usually as the only designer in the room. I would rather show you something you can click than describe it in a deck.
The case studies below are the long ones. Each is a system I designed, built, and then lived with. The first for fourteen years.
Fourteen years of one system running a real business.
AllOEMRims sells factory-original wheels. I have been designing and building the software that runs it since 2012: the storefront, the warehouse tools, the listing pipeline, and the ledger that ties it together.
Read case study →
I moved to Florida at nineteen for a web job. I left having drawn the whole brand family.
I designed campaign creative across the Payless brand family, then kept building: the corporate site, the sub-brand sites, and the intranet the whole company ran on.
Read case study →
One system connecting renters, franchisees, and the corporate office.
At Payless Car Rental I built the system that connected renters, franchisees, and the corporate office: one ticket per issue, one place to resolve it. It stayed in use for years after I left.
Read case study →
I was still a student in the district when I started rebuilding its website.
I built my school district's first real website while I was still a student in it, plus the publishing system eight schools used to run their own pages.
Read case study →
One tool, rebuilt for whoever walked in the door, for nine years.
I spent a decade building the same thing for different businesses: a way for the person who knows what needs to change to change it without writing code.
Read case study →
Four audiences, one site, and a design system to keep them apart.
A 2008 portal for people building a house: find a lot, a builder, a developer and a mortgage in one place, with a color system keeping four audiences oriented.
Read case study →
Eighteen screens, from hand-drawn wireframe to finished interface.
In 2009 a music licensing startup sent me pencil wireframes by email. I sent back finished screens, usually the same day. This page keeps the paper.
Read case study →this goes straight to my inbox.
