Senior UX Product Designer. Online and mobile banking, branch kiosks, and the public website for a 740-branch bank, plus a financial literacy course waiting on its launch date.
“Daniel takes full ownership of his projects with a tight attention to detail. He brings big ideas backed up by UX design principles, research and a great eye for design aesthetic… He is an absolute pleasure to work with.”
Jamie Montross, AVP UX Design Manager, my manager at Woodforest
Hola. I'm Daniel Glaze, DGlaze. I live in Houston, and I married my best friend 11 years ago. Spanish is her first language, so I'm learning it well enough to talk with mi suegra without a translator in between. We have four kids, and we're raising them to be confident and kind, the kind of people who leave a room better than they found it. Explaining something complicated to a four-year-old taught me to strip an idea to the part that actually matters, and I had years of practice before it was ever my job.
Before design, I was a professional hip-hop dancer. From college until I got married I choreographed all over Texas: competitive teams, studios, even a ballet conservatory. That is where I learned to work inside a constraint instead of around it, to cut what I loved when it stopped serving the piece, and to teach a move until someone else could carry it. The goal now is to be a professional hip-hop dancer once again.
I'm an OG ADHDer, diagnosed in the '90s. What it actually buys me is hyperfocus, and a life that runs on systems because it has to. It also means I'd rather make you laugh than win an argument, and I'm more interested in what shaped your thinking than in getting you to agree with me.
What gets handed to me is usually somebody's solution wearing a problem's clothes, so I work it backward until I have the real one. 0 → 1 is the part I want: no complete picture, no defined problem, nothing to wait for.
Styling happens after the fact. Craft doesn't. I choreographed for years: on a hi-hat, the move has to look like a hi-hat. I hold a design to that bar, so it fits its problem like the only version there was. Nobody asks why a right answer looks the way it does.
Most teams measure a design system by reach: more products, more files. That describes a library. I measure it by what survives the handoff, because the whole point is that someone builds it correctly without asking me. A system is only real where it stays accurate in production.
Research, testing, and experience get me close, and none of them tell me how a thing behaves once it is load-bearing in someone's day. What I learn in production corrects what I built, then changes the next version and the one after. That's 1 → N.
My work at the bank has been regulated products and other people's money, where a wrong call lands on a real person. That's the kind of problem I want, whatever the industry. I write the spec developers build from, and then I hold what ships to it. I walk product owners and the executives who sign off through the design until they can argue for it themselves. After hours I'm building products of my own, each one a problem I couldn't leave alone.
I'm looking for senior and lead product design roles on a team that says the true thing out loud, at a company where design is in the room when the strategy gets decided. I don't need to be the one at the front of that room. I need to be on the team that's in it.
The next step for me is building designers as well as products. I want the next place to be the one I finish my career at. If you're making something people depend on and want a designer who's easy to build with, let's talk.
Undefeated. Won axe throwing outright against the whole department, and every team I landed on took the cup.
Winner, Office Hall of Fame, first ballot. The campaign was run entirely by my coworkers.
