Calling this portfolio website “complete” might be a bit generous—it’s more accurate to say that it’s a complete minimum viable product. Like any good design project, this website will require ongoing edits, maintenance, and evolution. It’s a living document of sorts, destined to grow and improve with each new portfolio example I add and every tweak I make to enhance its usability.
Acknowledgment
I also want to address the elephant in the room: the glaring gap between this article and my last one, and the one before that. Too many designer blogs take on a predictable pattern after long silences—either an awkward apology or an overambitious promise of frequent updates moving forward. While I won’t make the latter mistake, I will acknowledge that I’ve now built a tool I’m excited to use for sharing my work and knowledge. With this foundation, I feel better equipped to commit to writing more regularly about the fields of design I work in, and I even have a plan for rolling out articles that touch on video game UI/UX, app design, creative direction, branding, and more. So while this is a small step, it’s one I feel good about.
What the Website Offers
The current iteration of my portfolio focuses on starting strong, with sections that highlight my key areas of expertise: Video Game Design, App Design, UI/UX Design, Creative Direction, and Graphic Design. Each section provides an introduction to my approach and showcases relevant projects. It’s intentionally structured to give visitors a clear understanding of my diverse design capabilities while allowing me to build and expand the portfolio over time.
More work went into this than I initially anticipated (as is often the case with creative endeavors). Every section, every paragraph, every image demanded my attention. And forgive me for feeling a little proud of what I’ve accomplished here—it’s satisfying to have a platform that reflects the quality of work I strive for in my design practice. That said, it’s not without its frustrations. For example, my header and footer have inexplicably gone wonky after the last round of tweaks. This, of course, is the nature of any design project: even the “final version” is never truly final.
Invitation
I encourage you to look around the site, explore my work, and feel free to reach out if you notice anything that seems off or out of place. Constructive feedback is always welcome, as it helps me refine and improve what I’ve built.
And, of course, if you’d like to discuss working with me, I’d love to hear from you. Whether it’s a project, a question, or just a conversation about design, I’m always open to connecting and sharing insights whenever I can. Thanks for stopping by—I hope you find something here that resonates!
Designing video games is an intricate process that involves the seamless combination of storytelling, aesthetics, and functionality to create an unforgettable player experience. While beautiful visuals and clever mechanics certainly contribute to the overall appeal, the heart of video game design lies in harmonizing storytelling, player-centric design, and seamless user interface integration. By carefully balancing these elements, we can transport players into immersive worlds while delivering intuitive and enjoyable gameplay.
And here’s a special challenge for you as you continue reading: try to find where any of the points I discuss are not relevant to design in general, regardless of the medium—print, web, apps, even more distant applications like public spaces, product design, and so on. You might need to do some translation to make it applicable, but I believe there are relevant points in all of these areas.
The power of storytelling
Storytelling in video games is a blend of visual and textual elements, each playing a critical role in shaping the player’s experience. While visuals often set the tone, text and writing carry much of the weight when it comes to sustaining engagement and driving narrative depth. For a detailed exploration of how these elements enhance game design, be sure to check out my article, The Power of Storytelling, which dives deeper into this subject.
Visual storytelling
When I designed the Crossy-Roads-style casino game, its quirky humor inspired bold, playful colors and custom graphics, ensuring that the visuals not only enhanced the tone but also complemented the gameplay mechanics
Or when I designed a Jurassic-era card trader/battler game, its more serious tone and its young male audience, what was needed was dramatic dinosaur action shots, stone and steel framing elements, and vivid, high-contrast colors for levels and counting symbols.
Every design decision—whether it’s color palettes, textures, typography, or button styles—supports the game’s tone and themes. At its best, visual storytelling doesn’t just create a beautiful game world—it guides players, highlights objectives, and ensures immersion.
Textual storytelling
Writing in video games can achieve what visuals alone cannot, offering players context, emotional depth, and narrative clarity. Dialogue brings characters to life, mission briefings and journals provide purpose, and even environmental text—like graffiti or signs—adds layers of meaning.
In the Old West-themed slots game I created, I paired immersive visuals with character-driven text to enhance the player’s connection to the game world. Instead of using standard UI copy like “Shoot one of the bottles for a bonus,” I wrote, “Take aim, partner. Go for the biggest BONUS! You’ve earned it,” while the game’s bounty hunter character acknowledged the player’s progress with a knowing look.
In both instances, the combination of visuals and text created a memorable, cohesive storytelling.
Player-centric design
At the core of every successful game is player-centric design. Understanding your audience and designing for their needs is essential to creating an engaging experience. Casual gamers may want simple, stress-free mechanics, while hardcore FPS players demand quick access to critical information.
In a fast-paced first-person shooter, the UI needed to communicate essential details like health, ammo, and objectives without interrupting the flow of gameplay. By prioritizing clarity and responsiveness in each design element, I ensured players could stay focused and immersed.
Empathy is the foundation of player-centric design. This means asking questions like:
Who are the players?
What do they need to succeed?
How can the design remove frustration and maximize enjoyment
Answering these questions requires user research, playtesting, and iterative design to refine the experience and keep the player at the center of every decision.
Seamless UI integration
A truly effective UI becomes invisible to the player—it integrates seamlessly into the game world, guiding without distracting. Achieving this balance requires deep collaboration with developers, attention to accessibility standards, and iterative refinement to ensure both functionality and aesthetics align perfectly.
In casual games like DropX, where players focus on clearing tiles on a grid, the UI needed to be visually engaging without pulling attention from the gameplay. I designed an 80s-inspired interface with vibrant colors and intuitive layouts, striking a balance between the nostalgic tone of the game and its functional requirements.
Seamless UI is more than just visual design; it’s about creating a dialogue between the player and the game. Every button click, menu navigation, and on-screen prompt should feel natural, guiding players without breaking immersion. By prioritizing this connection, I ensure that the UI enhances, rather than detracts from, the overall player experience.
Bringing it all together
When storytelling, player-centric design, and seamless UI integration come together, the result is a game that captivates players and keeps them coming back. These elements work in harmony—the visuals set the stage, the text deepens the story, and the UI ensures a smooth, immersive experience.
For me, designing video games is about more than just crafting worlds and interfaces; it’s about creating experiences that resonate on a personal level with players. My diverse background in storytelling, branding, and UI/UX design allows me to approach each project with a unique perspective, blending technical expertise with creative vision to push the boundaries of what’s possible in game design.
Whether you’re designing a charming casual game or an action-packed first-person shooter, the goal remains the same: to deliver an experience that’s engaging, intuitive, and unforgettable. And as the industry continues to evolve, I’m excited to keep exploring new ways to connect with players through thoughtful, innovative design.
Drawing on my experience in behavioral health and SaaS industries, I’ve learned that designing apps is more than an exercise in balancing aesthetics and functionality, important as that is; it’s about creating solutions that address real-world problems and seamlessly scale to accommodate growth and change, especially in today’s fast-changing digital landscape.
Whether it’s an enterprise-level behavioral health application or a SaaS solution for streamlining organizational processes, the core of successful app design lies in understanding your users’ needs, solving their problems effectively, and planning for long-term adaptability.
Understanding the problem
The first step in designing any app is identifying and gaining a deep understanding of each of the problems it aims to solve. This begins with thorough research—conducting interviews, analyzing workflows, and gathering user feedback, and so on.
For example, in the behavioral health industry, I contributed to the design of an application aimed at simplifying the ride selection process for individuals with developmental disabilities. Creating an app that works is always a given. The challenge is ensuring that it addressed the a wide variety of users, accommodating their varying levels of cognitive and physical ability. By working closely with stakeholders, caregivers, and end-users, we identified pain points such as difficulty selecting the right transportation and scheduling conflicts.
Our research provided the necessary information to create an intuitive, user-centered app that made selecting and scheduling rides a straightforward process for all users, regardless of their abilities.
In my work with SaaS applications, I’ve tackled real-world problems like optimizing ad placement within live-streaming platforms. The challenge here was creating a system that leveraged AI to recommend ad placements while providing users with actionable analytics in real time. This required a deep understanding of both the technical capabilities of AI and the needs of advertisers looking for insights into user behavior.
Designing for usability
An app might have all the functionality in the world, but if users struggle to navigate it, the app has failed its primary purpose. Here are examples of projects and what factors related to usability I needed to consider.
Behavioral health example: Simplifying complexity
In the behavioral health app I helped design, we focused heavily on accessibility and usability. Key features included:
Streamlined User Flows: We designed the app to guide users step by step, simplifying ride selection by presenting options based on user preferences and abilities.
Visual Cues: Clear, accessible visual indicators, such as color-coded vehicle types and schedules, helped users easily identify the best choices.
Adaptive Interfaces: The app’s interface was tailored to users with developmental disabilities, featuring large, easy-to-read text and simplified navigation to prevent confusion.
These usability considerations not only solved the immediate problem but also built trust with the app’s audience, ensuring long-term user engagement.
SaaS example: Real-time data vizualization
For the live-streaming SaaS platform, usability meant providing users with actionable data without overwhelming them. We designed a live analytics dashboard that:
Simplified Data Presentation: By using clean, intuitive visualizations, users could quickly understand complex data like user views, clicks, and conversion rates.
Customizable Features: Users could adjust ad parameters in real-time using sliders and drop-down menus, making the process efficient and intuitive.
Proactive Design Adjustments: Based on user feedback, I optimized the layout to include an ad carousel, making it easier for advertisers to manage multiple campaigns simultaneously.
In both cases, usability was not just about making the app easy to use—it was about anticipating user needs and designing for seamless interaction.
As you consider any app design, remember that usability isn’t just about creating a seamless experience for the app’s end users. It’s equally important to design tools and features that make the app functional and efficient for the client—the organization or entity that hired you.
Scalability: Planning for the future
Solving immediate user problems is crucial, but designing for scalability ensures the app remains relevant and functional as user needs evolve and the user base grows.
Behavioral health example: Planning for growth
When designing the behavioral health app, scalability was a critical consideration. Though the initial scope focused on a specific geographic area in Canada, the app was designed to expand seamlessly to other regions. Key scalability features included:
Modular Architecture: The app was built with a flexible back-end architecture, allowing new regions, languages, and ride types to be added without disrupting existing functionality.
Interoperability: It was designed to integrate with other behavioral health systems and services, creating a seamless experience for users as the app expanded.
SaaS example: Leveraging AI for flexibility
In the SaaS ad placement platform, scalability was built into the system through AI and data-driven decision-making. As the app grew to support larger audiences and more advertisers, features such as:
AI Learning Models: The system became smarter over time, adapting to changing user behavior and advertiser needs.
Cloud-based Infrastructure: This ensured the app could handle spikes in user traffic during live events without performance issues.
By planning for scalability during the design phase, we avoided costly overhauls later on, ensuring the apps could grow alongside user needs and industry demands.
Scalability: Planning for the future
The real challenge in designing apps for real-world problems lies in striking the right balance between usability and scalability. Too often, apps sacrifice one for the other—focusing so heavily on user experience that they fail to scale or prioritizing growth at the expense of usability. However, when these two elements are integrated thoughtfully, the result is an app that not only solves immediate user problems but also remains a valuable tool for years to come.
For example, the behavioral health app succeeded because it combined an intuitive user experience with a modular architecture that allowed it to scale. Similarly, the SaaS platform’s real-time analytics dashboard was both easy to use and capable of supporting more complex features as the user base expanded.
Key takeaways
Understand the Problem: Effective app design begins with understanding the real-world problems users face and gathering insights through research and feedback.
Prioritize Usability: Design intuitive interfaces that guide users seamlessly, anticipating their needs and removing friction from the user experience.
Plan for Scalability: Build apps that can grow and adapt, using flexible architectures and technologies that accommodate future needs.
Designing for usability and scalability is both an art and a science. By keeping these principles at the forefront of every project, I’ve been able to create apps that not only meet users’ needs today but are also equipped to grow and evolve alongside them. Whether in the behavioral health industry or the SaaS space, the goal remains the same: to build apps that solve real-world problems effectively and create lasting value for users.
TwelveStone Health began as a humble startup with an inconsistent brand identity, an outdated website, and little digital marketing presence. As the client was essentially a solo founder with a small team, they lacked even a company name when they approached us.
The Need
Our client required a complete transformation into a well-established company, starting with a new company name and a corporate identity that signified growth, regardless of their current size.
The Proposal
Our first step was brainstorming a suitable company name. Drawing inspiration from the founder’s Christian values, we identified a favorite biblical verse that led to the creation of “White Stone Health.” We then crafted the logo, designed essential print collateral, and developed a fully responsive website with compelling copy. Experience design played a crucial role in this process. Following this, we meticulously planned and implemented a multi-channel digital marketing strategy.
The Outcome
Throughout our partnership with TwelveStone, we consistently met and exceeded the client’s expectations. White Stone Health has continued to thrive, building upon the foundation we established at the outset. This strong foundation has demonstrated that strategic planning for future growth is a valuable and enduring investment.
Lessons Learned
Our upfront research and planning for TwelveStone Health proved to be invaluable. Regardless of the company’s rapid expansion into new territories, our corporate identity and design remained adaptable. One challenge we encountered was that the branding, while reflecting the gentle sentiment of the biblical verse it was inspired by, required adjustments in terms of color and saturation to accommodate various applications as the company grew.
Graphic design for UX/UI, Websites, Print, and Digital
From a technical perspective, print and digital design are differentiated by units, resolutions, and types of output. Print is designed in points and picas, sometimes inches and millimeters: web is designed in pixels. Print output has always fallen in the 100-600 pixels per inch (ppi), depending upon the need, where digital output is wholly dependent upon the size of the screen on which it is being viewed—72 to nearly 600 ppi as of this post. Print is mostly PDFs with the occasional exception, while digital is wide open with a plethora of vector to raster file types. From a client/partner’s perspective it’s all about how the end user will view and/or use the designed product. Will the customer be holding it or will he/she be viewing it from 1000 feet away? Will they need to be prompted to call/email or will they be clicking it, etc. [See Related Services on this page for a breakdown of the types of work associated with each of these design categories, including links to portfolios showcasing some of the work Company Man Design has done.]
Print vs Digital
Whether considering print design and digital design jobs, the distinction between the two is largely irrelevant. A designer either has or doesn’t have enough experience to be confident designing certain rare or complicated types of work. In the end, good design is good design.
Good Graphic Design Is Good Graphic Design
The check list of design is fairly, almost surprisingly, small:
There’s a design space (even if that design space is flexible as with responsive websites)
There are client/partner goals and requirements—target demographic, message and tone, branding elements, and text and imagery
There is a clear call-to-action (or multiple ones)
And there are vendor, publication, and/or other output considerations—screen, print, and (in the case of copy and scripting) broadcast
But, again, it’s all design. The designer takes all the requirements (and recognizes and alerts you to to any that may be missing) and creates an effective piece, meaning one that is well-designed, is strongly-messaged, and that is presented to the correct target demographic at the right time and in the most accessible and user-friendly medium to ensure a business-positive action on their part.
Sounds simple, right?
Eggs and Baskets
Though we’ve established that it’s not a competition between print and digital, that’s not to say that one is better than the other FOR YOU. Even then, the choice usually isn’t a stark one of one or the other; rather, it’s a matter of how much marketing emphasis should be assigned at a particular time. Some clients may gain more general benefit from print or vice versa, but usually the distribution of resources is on a case-by-case or campaign-by-campaign basis. Over the last six years of our relationship with one of our longest-standing clients, there are been phases where we focused nearly 100% of our efforts on print. At other times, that same client’s focus was split 50/50 between print and digital efforts. They upped their digital game leading up to trade shows and other events, when they were in the midst of relocating their home office, and each time they have expanded into new markets. All the while, print has proceeded at the same pace.
Company Man Design has experience designing nearly all types of work all channels: print, digital, and web. Additionally, we are uniquely experienced to aid your organization in making these important choices is how to most wisely distribute your marketing resources.
CONTACT US
Your search for “Graphic Designers in San Antonio” should start here, with me, Thomas McAuley, your graphic design and advertising/marketing partner.
With years of experience translating complex ideas in to easy-to-understand, eye-catching, and appropriate products, both as the lead designer and behind the wheel as art director, communicating with C-Level contacts and multi-functional team members alike, I am a valuable addition to your marketing strategy implementation.
I do it all.
Corporate Branding & Corporate Identity, Website Design & SEO, UX/UI Design & Prototyping, Print & Digital Graphic Design, Social Media Design. PLUS, as an art director, I am positioned to be just the right art director to help your organization get project goals defined and produced, on time and on budget.
Graphic design for the healthcare industry
With our enormous medical center in our northwest and with multiple military installations in and around our periphery, San Antonio is one of the most important healthcare hubs in the nation.
That fact dovetails well with my own graphic design experience. If you haven’t already noticed, you’ll see that my graphic design portfolios are overwhelmingly filled with examples from the healthcare industry or peripheral to it. Since 2012, I have been working as a plugin graphic design company for marketing company, Punching Nun Group, adding full graphical support to their long list of marketing-related services they provide to multiple healthcare companies across the country. During this long partnership, I have become something of a corporate identity design expert, doggedly defending brand at every step of the design process. You could do worse than rely on me for healthcare-centric design.
If you don’t see it? Ask.
I invite you to look through my many work portfolios below. If you don’t see the type of work you’re looking for, don’t doubt: it’s very likely I do that too and have not gotten to creating a unique portfolio page for it.
Recent Comments