Hi there! I'm Ariel, a design engineer in New York. I work at the seam between design and front-end, which in practice means I own design systems and the things built on top of them: the tokens, the components, the motion, and the accessibility bar all of it has to clear. At the moment I'm the only engineer on a fintech marketing platform, so the design system and the CMS behind it are both mine to get right.

CSS is where I'm happiest, and not as a paint layer. It's the thing doing the actual work: layout, depth, motion, the small physics of a hover. I'd rather solve something with a token and a :has() than reach for another dependency. And I care that it holds up when nobody's watching, that it runs at 60fps, that it works from the keyboard, that the contrast is real. That isn't a box I tick at the end; it's most of why the system exists at all.

Before engineering I spent ten years running a food business, from one stall at the Hester Street Fair to the High Line and a handful of NYC parks. Ten years of owning the outcome with nobody to escalate to, which is where the pace comes from. These days the same instinct shows up differently: when I notice I've explained the same convention twice, I stop and write it down as tooling so I never explain it again.

This room is where the experiments live. Everything you see is CSS, no WebGL and no 3D library, just a lot of cubes. Have a poke around, the dog likes attention.