Bridging design and engineering.

I take on systems problems that need a designer and an engineer in the same person. Design tooling, AI agents, and the infrastructure that connects teams to what they ship. Off the clock, I'm building Race Day, a real game in Unreal Editor for Fortnite.

Let's Build Something

Featured Work

Transforming complexity into elegant systems

Selected Work

From AI products and platforms to mobile experiences

Civic Data · Research Tool

Off Nominal

A weekend UAP browser that grew into a correlation engine for 2,737 declassified records — UAP cases, nuclear tests and incidents, physics milestones, CIA Stargate files. Timeline, world map, and a cross-dataset entity network, with a statistical honesty layer (Monte Carlo p-values + an adversarial skeptic) that flags which connections are real and which are coincidence. Static site, no servers; every record links to its official source.

Afternoon Build · Local-first

Strictly Spending

A local-first budgeting dashboard, pair-coded with Claude in an afternoon. The first time I actually knew where the money was going. Runs in the browser. Nothing leaves the laptop.

In Progress · UEFN

Race Day

An on-foot racing game I'm building in UEFN with Claude Code as my engineering partner. Custom Verse logic, zone-based tracks, persistent per-mode leaderboards, NPC enemies, and a phased build workflow currently at Phase 10.

AI Product

Industrial Data Labs

Took an AI concept from initial strategy through full product design and launch. Built intelligent data analysis tools that help industrial companies make sense of complex manufacturing data using machine learning.

Design System

CallRail Design System

Design system to the rescue. Created a comprehensive component library that unified the product experience and accelerated development cycles for this leading call tracking platform.

Product Design

Let's Read

A family network for sharing stories. Designed an intuitive mobile experience that connects generations through the joy of reading together, wherever they are.

About Me

Portrait of Chris Barnes
My son helped me take this with my telescope
(Maxwell Barnes)

I design the platforms behind AI products. That means pattern libraries, agent UX, and the design infrastructure other designers and engineers build on.

Today I lead the design system and AI tooling at an enterprise SaaS platform. Before that, I did similar work at startups, agencies, and as a consultant. Past collaborators include Disney, Intel, Weather Channel, Southern Company Gas, Kimberly Clark, and IHG.

I'm a designer who ships code, so the systems I design are the same ones I prototype and hand off. What I'm best at: turning a fuzzy "we need an AI feature" into a real platform of tokens, components, agents, and workflows.

Based in Atlanta.

Platform Design AI Systems Design Design Infrastructure Agent UX Design Tokens Pattern Libraries Figma + MCP React + TypeScript

Let's Work Together

Open to Principal IC roles, design-leadership consulting, and AI/platform collaborations