Do good work.do better.

Pursue the better story.

The good decisions never felt like it at the time. Too risky, too strange, too far from the obvious path. I made them anyway. You do that for twenty years and you end up somewhere nobody planned.

The right call always looked wrong first. I've learned to treat that as a signal, not a warning.

DARREN CORNWELL / DESIGN LEADER
Experience20+ years
BasedAustin, TX
CurrentlyVP, Creative & Design, Tucows
Started inFilm & storytelling, BBC
PastGoDaddy, Uniregistry
StatusRoles, consulting & workshops

I started in film. Storytelling first, then design, then leading the people who do both. Twenty years of that, across domain registrars, enterprise software, and rooms where the decisions actually get made.

These days I build North Stars, run design organisations, and use AI the way a good editor uses a red pen: fast on the obvious stuff, brutal on everything else.

+18/16
CSAT and NPS lift after a North Star and design system launch
30%
Reduction in time to market through design system infrastructure
2hrs
Time to first design iteration, down from a week, after adopting AI-augmented design workflows
66%
US market share in the investor domain aftermarket, 40% globally
32
People led directly, within a 200+ person global org
5+
First-to-market products shipped
21
Fortune 500 enterprises landed in year one of a new platform
STRATEGY

Enterprise UX & product strategy

Grounded in real world results, not theory. Multi-year roadmaps built to survive contact with the business.

LEADERSHIP

Global team leadership

Building and running design organisations that grow, scale, and hold their craft along the way.

SYSTEMS

Design systems

Infrastructure that simplifies and accelerates delivery, reducing friction for every team that touches it.

ALIGNMENT

Executive storytelling

Translating complexity into a story that aligns leadership, teams, and customers around the same outcome.

AUTOMATION

AI-augmented design workflows

Generative tools handle the first draft. Every time. Then you stare at what came back and decide what's actually worth keeping. That part is still human, still hard, and nobody's automated it yet. Prompting, APIs, judgement. In that order.

Outside of full time roles, I run multi-day workshops for teams that need to find their story: vision, North Stars, storytelling that actually lands with leadership. I've run enough of these to know the difference between a workshop that produces a deck nobody opens again, and one that changes how a team works.

VISION

Vision & North Star

A few focused days to turn a vague direction into a plan the whole team can get behind.

STORY

Storytelling for leaders

Helping execs and teams shape the story that gets budget approved and people aligned.

FOUNDATIONS

Design system kickoffs

Getting the foundations right before a system becomes everyone's problem.

ENQUIRE ABOUT A WORKSHOP →
The interesting life is always one door past the sensible one.

Twenty years of choosing the harder option. The unconventional path, the difficult room, the problem nobody had solved yet. That's the story. If you're building something that needs someone who's been in those rooms and knows what to do when they get there, let's talk.

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