The Three Caballeros
of Chapel Hill
Or how I found myself deep in Tar Heel Country building marketing platforms for car dealerships.
3 Birds Marketing
I joined 3 Birds Marketing as a Front-End Developer and UI Designer, and stayed long enough to grow into an Interactive Art Director. That, by itself, tells most of the story. Riveting, I know.
When I started, my job was pretty straightforward. I took designs and turned them into fast, responsive, reliable interfaces: dashboards, websites, and emails. I created things that had to work across devices, browsers, and inboxes that were actively trying to break them. The client base was large, varied, and not especially forgiving, which meant the work had consequences. If something broke, people noticed.
Early on, I worked closely with designers and project managers to translate concepts into real, usable experiences. That meant writing clean front-end code, making smart layout decisions, and pushing back when something looked good but didn’t make sense in practice. I spent a lot of time thinking about edge cases, performance, and how things behaved once they left the safety of a staging environment.
One of the biggest projects I worked on during that time was a new website platform for 3 Birds. The goal wasn’t to design a single site; it was to build a flexible, mobile-ready system that our clients, mostly car dealerships, could actually use. Dealers needed to spin up responsive, conversion-focused pages quickly, from vehicle landing pages to specials, to long-form automotive content, all without breaking brand or usability.
I handled the UX, UI, and custom front-end development for the platform. The challenge wasn’t visual polish, it was restraint. The goal was to create templates and themes that were flexible without becoming chaotic, and powerful without being fragile. Watching clients use the drag & drop builder I created in the real world forced every decision to justify itself. If something was confusing, it showed up immediately.
Email was another major focus, and honestly, one of the more humbling ones. We built a responsive email platform that worked across every major email client, including those that seem to have a vendetta against modern code. The goal was to give dealerships a forward-thinking design paired with total reliability. I handled UX, UI, front-end development, testing, and ongoing support, which meant a lot of time in inboxes, test suites, and conversations that started with, “Why does Outlook do this?”
That work changed how I think about design systems. You don’t get bonus points for cleverness in email. You get points for consistency, clarity, and not embarrassing your client on launch day, because you know, Outlook.
As my role evolved, I started taking on more responsibility for direction and strategy. I became deeply involved in designing model landing pages that had to meet strict OEM compliance, while still feeling clean, modern, and useful. The layouts were intentionally simple, focused on highlighting what made each vehicle unique without overwhelming the user. Working within those constraints sharpened my ability to make thoughtful trade-offs and to design with purpose rather than simply decoration.
That same mindset carried into the vehicle search results and vehicle details pages. The goal was transparency: help users understand what they’re seeing, compare options easily, and move from browsing to buying without feeling manipulated. I led the UX, UI, and front-end work, balancing compliance, business goals, and actual user behavior. When it worked, it felt invisible, which is kind of the point.
I also spent time designing and building internal tools. One was an assessment app used by the digital evaluation team to analyze a dealership’s online presence across search, reputation, website performance, and social media. It wasn’t flashy, but it mattered. People used it every day to make decisions, which meant clarity and usability were non-negotiable.
Another was an automated marketing platform that combined online and offline behavior to drive tailored email campaigns. I collaborated on UX and handled custom front-end development, ensuring complex systems remained understandable to the people operating them.
Over time, my role shifted fully into interactive art direction. I wasn’t just thinking about how things looked or how they were built, but why we were building them at all. I managed cross-functional teams, guided creative strategy, and helped shape products that had to scale across hundreds of clients. Responsive design, performance, and usability weren’t features; they were expectations.
What 3 Birds taught me, more than anything, was how to design for scale without losing care. When you’re building systems, instead of one-offs, your decisions ripple outward. Small shortcuts become big problems; whereas thoughtful structure becomes longlasting solutions.
At the end of my time at 3 Birds, I didn’t think of myself as just a designer or a developer anymore. I was someone who thought in systems, defended users, and understood how creative decisions show up in metrics, support tickets, and real business outcomes.
That mindset still shapes how I work today: build things that last, make them clear, and never forget that someone on the other end actually has to use them.