Now accepting contract work, small weekly allotments available for brand and interaction design.
I’m Jacob Waites, a visual & Interaction designer. I focus on building projects to learn and helping craft brand experiences with stories around them. I seek to make others successful through experimentation with new technologies. I specialize in craft mentorship, design tooling, and building creative culture & community.
I believe that collaborative design systems are the key to unlocking the future of collaboration. I view design tooling as a focus, with collaboration, learning, and load balancing as goals. Where in physical space I create artifacts, in digital space I assemble tools for making those artifacts.
Projects
I crafted a printed card deck and boxes for the U.S. Surgeon General to hand out on his Made to Connect Tour to colleges and universities around America to talk with students about loneliness and social isolation. The cards provide small example actions for someone to take as part of the 5 for 5 Challenge, where participants take 5 minutes for 5 days to practice social connection exercises. The printed deck is a counterpart to a digital deck available on the surgeongeneral.gov.
I created art direction and web designs for the U.S. Office of the Surgeon General's landmark release of a new advisory highlighting the epidemic of loneliness in America, including the final cover design for the Advisory.
I created a brand, visual identity, and animations for the U.S. Office of the Surgeon General's first-ever podcast. The project was part of a new set of initiatives on health misinformation, youth mental health, and clinician burnout that I led up at OSG supported by our design team.
I created a visual system and product designs for Scope 6, a tool that leverages decentralized and classical web technologies to create full transparency systems for sustainability-linked financial assets to create a culture of carbon accountability in the enterprise.
I created the visual design and component system for Zapata's flagship quantum orchestration software– Orquestra Studio. Created to be natively integrated into VS Code, the product acts as an extension of the quantum scientist or engineer's existing toolkit to bring more power directly to their fingertips at enterprise scale.
During my time leading Foremost, we purchased an old mid-century property, an Esso gas station, and re-developed it into a community culture and gathering center.
Side Projects
I created a brand and visual system for a local food co-op in Watertown, MA. We're accepting memberships now!
I've made many tools, plugins, and templates for the Figma community, some more useful than others. Over the years I've created Figma featured games such as the Game of Strife (which at one point was included as a default template type in the Figma create new modal), and the Figsaw Puzzler (which lets you do puzzles with your friends in Figma), each with thousands of duplications on the community.
I created a tool for creating puzzles in Figma using any image, 500 pieces only.
During the beginning of the pandemic, I created a 2020 edition of a Game of Life format board game in Figma called the Game of Strife. It became so popular that at one point it was a template option in Figma's "Create New" menu under the games category.
Work Experience
Directing Interaction Design for the US OSG Digital Innovation Group.
I design interactive brand experiences, visual elements, and product interfaces for Station in an attempt to empower a new generation of decentralized workforce contributors.
Hired and led a design team for the US OSG Digital Innovation Group. Designed an internal visual web design system for the Office built off of USWDS standards. Designed and produced visuals for campaigns addressing Health misinformation, Youth mental health, and Healthcare worker burnout. Designed a brand for the Office's first podcast: House Calls with Dr. Vivek Murthy.
Headed up the design team trying to re-shape how we think about quantum computing in the enterprise.
Led design efforts and built a design system for Zapata's flagship product, Orquestra, a software tool for quantum orchestration. Built out marketing projects including web component systems, brand video and animations, as well as design for an internal brand and show series.
Designed, prototyped, and built innovative future experiences at IDEO CoLab working with distributed web and data-driven intelligence topics.
An early member of the core team, I shaped the visual brand presence and maker culture at CoLab. I helped lead teams on projects over multiple prototyping sprints every year and helped them to craft new design patterns for blockchain, XR, IoT, and machine learning products.
Worked on a flagship product team creating prototypes and experiences of future product features and tools. Helped to forward emerging project opportunities focused on creating a cohesive produce ecosystem through design-thinking exercises and structured activities with a project team.
Co-founded a creative collective of freelancers and builders–Foremost. We worked to "Build things Better". I focused on crafting brand experiences for great companies, enhanced through attention to detail on all aspects of brand development, product design, and urban development. Day to day activities included product design and development, sketching buildings, staring at color swatches, shooting photos in studio, and building websites and apps.
Our largest redevelopment project came in the form of Happy Motoring, a mid-century era Esso gas station re-developed into a community cultural gathering space and eatery. The project was featured in the Bitter Southerner and multiple local publications.
At Bright Red / TBWA, I designed and created advertisements and brand elements for both national and internationally clients. Day-to-day activities included art and creative direction, designing for both print and digital media, and a strong base in concept creation and project iteration.
Assigned clients included Pilot Pens, Club Med, Visit Florida, Renaissance Aruba, and more.
Came on as a front-end developer and shifted into a creative direction role after working on multiple brand projects. Responsible for directing designers, developing brands, and leading the execution of design concepts for various local and national clients. Day to day activities including assessment of business needs, creative direction, designing for both print and digital media, and a strong base in concept creation and project iteration.
Designed & conceptualized future brand elements for the University. Also created ad layouts and small print projects.
Speaking
A talk I gave with Jess Freaner and Wenting Guo on designing for augmented intelligence. My portion of the group talk covered a walkthrough of a project that my team at IDEO produced for Pillpack in an effort to create more empathy for customers who are being interacted with over customer service lines using generative visuals and a data model that call-center employees could use on the fly.
A talk on digital prototyping tooling and workflows that we used in the CoLab studio, given to the Tallahassee AIGA organization. The talk covered the meaning of prototyping as it stands in IDEO culture, and how we get to something engaging enough to want in just two weeks.
Writing
While an object is just a thing that serves its purpose until it’s tossed out, an artifact sparks an invisible conversation, a connection between the human who made it and the human experiencing it. This piece speaks to my view on putting your sense of self into creating and design an artifact.
A prototype diary of an IoT financial futures project for Gig workers made in collaboration with Shuya Gong while I was building at IDEO CoLab.
A prototype diary of a web3 biomimicry communications project done while I was building at IDEO CoLab.
Features
A piece from the Bitter Southerner on drag culture at Happy Motoring in Tallahassee, FL, a redevelopment that I helped lead design for while heading Foremost Creative.
A feature of me speaking at CoLab's Annual Blueprint event in 2018 about the Three Things prototype for urban streaming data exploration and simulation.
Featured on Fonts In Use for my designs using Cera Pro and Sentinel for IDEO CoLab's original website before the re-design.
Featured on One Page Love for the design and development of a digital/physical educational design book series I created.
Featured on One Page Love for the design and development of the Hub Crawl EU event website.
Education
Specializing Web Design, Interactive Media, and Digital Fabrication.
Contact
Teams
