Ted Irvine

Some designers manage. Some still make things. Few do both.

I’ve spent 15+ years building teams, shaping brands, and never quite putting the tools down. That last part matters. At Vox Media, I took a three-person design group and built it into a 50-person department.

At Inman, I run design across the whole organization — product, events, editorial, brand. Smaller stage, sharper mandate.

Getting closer to execution opened a door I didn’t expect. I watched our dev team rebuild how they worked with AI and decided to figure out how design could fit into that. The first version of everything needed rebuilding. Move fast, fail, fix. Build infrastructure you can actually rely on coming out the other side.

What I’ve learned is that working with AI isn’t a skill problem, it’s a collaboration problem. You problem-solve together, the same way you would with any good colleague.

I think in systems. I design for humans. I build teams that outperform their size, and I stay close enough to the work to know when something’s off.

Based in Lancaster, PA.