justin zagar
I trained on paper, where there is no undo.
I went to school for graphic design, and print is where the discipline came from. A mistake shipped in ink stays shipped. Screens pulled me in early too: at the Milwaukee newspaper I built interactive Flash ads in the digital department and animated them by hand, frame by frame.
Then came the Payless Car Rental years, where the print training got used for real. I designed the campaign creative across seven brands in the group, rental, car sales, parking, lodging, franchising, the loyalty program, and built the cross-brand tagline system that carried it. The annual print program was mine: the campaign posters, the rental jackets and the global location directory. So were the airport signs and even the livery on the shuttle buses. And behind all of it I kept building: the corporate site, the sub-brand sites, and the intranet the whole company ran on.
Since 2012 I've designed the software behind a national wheel business. I designed the inventory system from scratch, wrote the listing pipeline by hand in Classic ASP, and designed and ran the storefront. Since 2026 I've directed AI to build the newer warehouse tools and the ledger that ties it all together. Fourteen years of one person designing it and running it.
AllOEMRims is being sold after fourteen years, and I am available now. I am looking for a full-time role in product, web or brand design, or founding product engineering, remote or hybrid. The business side has a home of its own at Evolve Engineering, and the rest of what I build is a house full of software I designed for my family.
The space obsession is real. It is why a starfield hangs behind every page of this site. Photography got in early too, and I have compulsions I stopped fighting. Things I will always stop to photograph: the sky doing something unusual, good signage, and the dogs when they hold still.
When I'm not in UX mode, I love to immerse myself in video games, movies, and anything else that tantalizes the senses. My partner and I live on the east coast of the United States with our four little doggos: Shirley, Noel, Lilly and Geordi.
how i work
I was still a student in my school district when I started rebuilding its website. I built a form so each school could run its own pages. In 33 months, 83 staff accounts published 2,111 pages. I wasn’t doing that work.
In 2007 Payless asked me for the pros and cons of putting customer reviews on its site. I’d built its complaint desk and read what came through it, so I had the evidence to answer. My report argued for reviews, then recommended against them, because the company was not ready to be told in public what it already knew in private.
In late 2012 a tire shop’s wheel inventory lived in a spreadsheet I built by hand. I spent three months in it deciding what a wheel is, then wrote the listing tool in a day. Most of those decisions are still holding weight. I didn’t know at the time that the deciding was the work.
The tool ran the business until 2026, when I directed AI to rebuild it. When eBay threw errors on listings missing a brand or part number, the AI’s fix filled the gaps with substitute values. I overruled it and kept anything that’s missing either one out of the ready-to-publish queue.
In 2012 a client’s project stalled, and he wrote that he was considering somebody else. I did not start coding faster. I asked him for a requirements document, and four days later he sent one. He kept checking every claim I made on the actual build, and that’s the reason it got good. At the wheel business I’ve designed and run the digital operation alone since 2012, with no product manager, engineer or researcher.
I would love to work on a team of talented individuals who are energized to provide feedback, to push back and challenge ideas, and to learn from and grow with.
my most demanding clients live in my house
- a watercolor app for my twin brother
- a location app so the family always knows who made it home
- a music player that just plays folders
- reminders that keep nagging, right on schedule
- the file drop that feeds movie night
- a pill tracker for my husband
they pay in honest feedback
skills & knowledge
languages
and classic ASP, where it all started
with ai
I plan and direct these builds, then review, test and run them
daily tools
Figma came easily after years in Illustrator, Fireworks and Photoshop. Brainstorm is a design workspace I directed AI to build.
currently in flight
- looking for a full-time role in product, web or brand design, or founding product engineering
- keeping the store online while AllOEMRims is sold
- sharpening this site, piece by piece
- and something for my family that they do not know about yet.
If you need the formal version, here is the resume.
about this site
None of the customer data behind the work is on this site: every admin screen, ledger and ticket you see was captured on a copy loaded with invented records. The details are on the privacy and data page.
There are 41 posts about the work on this site and 468 projects in the field. You are looking at number 42. It runs on a WordPress theme I designed and directed AI to build: no page builder, no framework, no build step. Templates, one stylesheet, and a little vanilla JavaScript. The starfield is generated fresh on every visit, so the sky you came in under is one nobody else will ever see. The nebula behind the homepage is the Carina Nebula, photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope (NASA), recolored into this site’s palette. The type is Jost for the words, Caveat for the handwriting, and Unbounded for the loud parts. Yes, I know a designer’s own site is never finished. That is the point.