Multidisciplinary designer & creative developer
Mike Watson.
Design Code Digital Experiences
I turn brand systems into finished work — benefit guides and campaigns, email and motion, websites and the interactive builds behind them. In-house, agency-side and independent since 2019. I design it, help build it, and ship it.
Flagship · independent build
StarlightX
An explorable universe of original art, music, browser games and interactive audiovisual experiments — conceived, art-directed and shipped as one connected product.
- Art & music Original
- Lab Hypercube · Signal Walk
- Game Shooter Z · 12 maps
- Stack WordPress · JS · Web Audio
- Process AI-assisted, human-directed
Selected work
Built for real
audiences.
Benefits programs, retail email, product UI and identity — work that had to be read, understood and acted on.
Texas Schools Health & Benefits Program
One public-sector benefits program, many touchpoints — survey results, plan education, a maternity series, bookmarks and banners, each adapted to its format without losing the brand.
Employee Benefit Guides
A season of benefit guides, enrollment flyers and summaries for employers across food, construction, finance, tech and ticketing — each one built on the client's own brand, not a template.
Email Marketing
Retail promotions and benefits communications built for the inbox — long-scroll layouts that stay readable on a phone, with one clear action per block.
Trade Matrix
A responsive dashboard I designed and coded to track profit and loss across brokerages that don't talk to each other.
Identity & Illustration
Marks and characters for small businesses and in-house teams — plus the hand-drawn work that keeps the craft sharp.
Soft Cell — Typographic Poster
A concert poster built from concentric arcs, a strict left axis and one weight of grotesque type — an exercise in restraint.
What I bring
One person,
whole pipeline.
The value isn't any single skill. It's that the idea, the design and the working product stay in the same hands.
Brand systems that survive production.
Benefit guides, flyers, decks, large-format print and email — on brand, on deadline, through real approval cycles with copywriters, creative directors and executives.
- InDesign
- Illustrator
- Photoshop
- Figma
Websites and tools that do a job.
WordPress sites and landing pages, plus internal web tools — request forms, automated price-quote generators, branded flyer delivery — in HTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP.
- WordPress
- HTML/CSS
- JavaScript
- PHP
- Python
Campaigns that reach people.
Motion graphics, testimonial and training video, social assets and email campaigns sent to thousands — and an AI-assisted workflow for prototyping fast without lowering the bar.
- After Effects
- Premiere Pro
- Mailchimp
- SEO
- AI tools