Work with me
Currently taking on a small number of engagementsDavid Demaree
I work at the seam where design, engineering, and product meet. I'm a designer, engineer, and product guy who spent about a decade at companies helping build modern design tooling used by millions — Typekit, Adobe Creative Cloud, Google Fonts and Material Design, design systems and UI toolkits at Stripe, and CSS tools and libraries at Webflow.
Stuff I work with
- TypeScript
- React
- SvelteKit
- Next.js
- Astro
- WordPress
- Ruby on Rails
- Laravel
- Native iOS Apps
- Web Components
- Design Systems
- Figma
- Custom AI Agents
How I can help
- Hands-on build I have more than 20 years' experience building web and mobile apps (both frontend and backend) at every scale, from a small business's custom knowledge base to the font search engine used by every Adobe customer.
- Fractional C(P)TO That's short for "Chief (Product/)Technology Officer". I can embed with your team part-time to lead design-engineering, design-systems, or product management work, or to stand these functions up where they don't exist yet.
- Advisory & Coaching A lighter touch: strategy, design and code review, and helping a founder or team make the structural calls before they get expensive to undo.
Track record
- Bits&LettersFounder & principal design engineer
- WebflowPrincipal PM, Designer Experience
- StripeStaff PM, design systems & front-end infrastructure
- GoogleLead PM, Google Fonts; PM, Material Design
- Adobe / TypekitStaff web engineer, later principal PM for the Adobe Type & Typekit product lines
Notable extras
While at Adobe, I was awarded patent US9471755B2 — Font protection management, covering systems for encrypting and protecting font data in native apps, with cloud-based usage tracking and activation. Features based on this work landed in Adobe's Creative Cloud iOS app to enable font syncing, and inspired Apple's 'font providers' iOS API introduced in 2019.
I wrote Git for Humans for A Book Apart, gave the opening keynote at Web Directions Product 2019, and TechCrunch once credited me with coining the phrase “cognitive overhead.”
You can see studio work at Bits&Letters or the longer version of my résumé on LinkedIn.
What folks say about working with me
David strikes that rare balance of design, creativity, and technical know-how, and made it easy for our team to move fast without sacrificing quality. He made the process of building and updating pages fun by creating templates and reusable components.
David's expertise straddles both deep technical concepts alongside a crisp view of customer needs. During his time at Webflow, he has led the launch of Variables - a launch that entailed - deep functionality, deep interoperability with our platform as well as external platforms, and the ability to scale over time.
David is a steady hand that launches features thoughtfully, with a solid bar for customer value, and can break down even the most complex of roadmaps into pieces that are easy for the team to deliver and rally behind.
David is one of those rare product leaders who truly bridges design, engineering, and storytelling.
He has a rigorous, systems-oriented mind that makes complex problems feel solvable. I suspect that his experience working at some of the best product companies has sharpened his ability to connect design and development decisions with the seemingly intangible and moving target of user delight. It's sort of magical working with him! Whether we were aligning on product strategy or refining granular details within a user experience, he consistently brought a mix of precision and empathy that raised the bar for everyone around him.
What I appreciate most about David is his commitment to the craft, great taste, and building things that both get the job done and push expectations about what great can look and feel like. He doesn't just ship features or websites; he builds systems that are elegant, maintainable, and deeply considered.
Get in touch
If any of that fits what you're trying to build, tell me about it.