Director, Product Design · an application by Andrew Hillstead

Your design director is already in the file

This page is my application. It's built in your visual language, shipped end to end with Claude Code, and it argues one thing: I'm the designer your JD is describing.

Read the pitch How this page was made
The pitch

Your product exists for people like me.

For eight years I've run the marketing and design workflows Jasper is reimagining. Strategy, brand, content, design, build, launch. For clients like SuperAI, Blackbird and Summer Game Fest, and for my own agency's growth.

Over the past two years I've rebuilt those workflows around AI myself, hands on, tool by tool. Not as a spectator writing think-pieces, but as the person whose business depended on getting it right. I know where these workflows break, where marketers stop trusting the output, and what it takes to keep enterprise-grade polish when machines are doing more of the making.

That's the perspective I'd bring to leading design at Jasper: I've been the customer. Now I want to build it from the inside.

andrew_hillstead.txtrole fit
  • Product design experience 8+ yrs, end to end
  • Leading design teams up to 15 people
  • Qualification Master of Design Innovation
  • Hands-on, on the tools daily, in Figma & code
  • AI-native tooling Claude Code, shipped work
  • Design systems built & governed for enterprise
  • Marketing domain it's literally my job
Point of view

Where design at Jasper could go

Three convictions I'd bring on day one. Opinions formed from the outside, held loosely, ready to be tested against your users and your data.

01

Trust is the interface

Non-deterministic output changes the contract between user and software. Enterprise marketers won't ship what they can't defend to a brand team or a legal team. Every agent output needs receipts: where it came from, what it checked, and why it believes it's on brand. Trust affordances aren't a feature. They're the product.

JD: non-deterministic outputs, trust/transparency
02

The design system is agent infrastructure

When coding agents build the front end, the design system stops being documentation for humans and becomes context for machines. Tokens, components and patterns structured so an agent picks the right component as reliably as a senior engineer would.

JD: design-to-front-end pipelines, coding agents
03

Craft at AI speed

Velocity without taste ships slop faster. A small team wins by prototyping in code, critiquing real interactions instead of static mocks, and holding the bar on typography, rhythm and hierarchy while everything else accelerates. The rituals matter: crits, reviews, and directors who stay on the tools.

JD: hands-on leadership, craft rituals, high-velocity team
One idea, made real

What "trust is the interface" looks like

Not a slide. A working sketch, wired to a live model. An agent drafted the campaign copy below. Click any chip to inspect a judgement it made, then hand it a product or a URL of your own.

agent output · review · awaiting review

Spring launch · hero copy

Brand Campaign Agent · draft 3 of 3 · brand check complete

Meet the platform that turns strategy into shipped campaigns. Built for teams who move fast without losing the plot on brand. Trusted by 20% of the Fortune 500, and ready for your busiest quarter yet.

Select a chip

The principle: every judgement the agent made is one click from inspection. Nothing is a black box, nothing interrupts flow.

  • ✓ Tone: confident, plain-spoken. Matches voice guide §2.
  • ✓ Banned words: none present (checked 34 terms).
  • ✓ Reading level: grade 7, within target.
  • ✓ Highlighted phrases scored against 128 approved assets.
  • ✓ "turns strategy into shipped campaigns" · positioning doc, 2026
  • ⚑ "20% of the Fortune 500" · last verified 8 months ago. Re-verify before publish?
  • → Draft 1 led with features. Rejected: your top-performing pages lead with outcomes.
  • → Draft 2 used "revolutionary". Rejected: banned-word list.
  • → Draft 3 mirrors the cadence of your two highest-converting heroes.
Live · Claude API
Your turn. Hand it a product, or a URL to read.
try:
Proof

Directed hands-on, shipped for real

Every major project at Psychoactive Studios for the last eight years: pitched, won, directed and worked on the tools by me, while leading a team of up to 15.

SuperAI conference brand and website by Psychoactive Studios

SuperAI

Asia's largest AI event. Design and web for the conference where the AI industry meets, an audience that spots inauthentic AI work instantly.

view case study →
10,000+attendees, Marina Bay Sands, sold out
 Blackbird VC digital work by Psychoactive Studios

Blackbird

Australasia's largest venture capital firm, backers of Canva. Brand-led digital work for an investor whose portfolio defines the region's tech design bar.

view case study →
$7B+funds under management
 Summer Game Fest digital experience by Psychoactive Studios

Summer Game Fest

The world's most-watched gaming showcase. Work seen by one of the largest live audiences on the internet, where nothing gets to break.

view case study →
62Mglobal livestreams, 2026, a record
 Aratek biometrics website by Psychoactive Studios

Aratek

Global leader in biometric and multi-factor authentication. Enterprise B2B redesign and rebuild for an audience of governments and banks.

view case study →
Enterpriseauth tech for governments & banks
 Woolf University brand and website by Psychoactive Studios

Woolf University

Brand and website for the collegiate digital institution making globally recognised university degrees accessible from anywhere.

view case study →
Globalhigher-ed platform, brand to build
 World of WearableArt festival website by Psychoactive Studios

World of WearableArt

Long-term digital partner to New Zealand's global wearable-art competition, a stage show and brand known around the world.

view case study →
60,000+attendees per season
More from the record
Things Inc website by Psychoactive Studios

Things Inc

Digital home for a creative studio building playful, experimental software for collaborative creation.

 Adidas All Blacks jersey launch site by Psychoactive Studios

Adidas × All Blacks

Interactive site for the All Blacks 2023 Rugby World Cup jersey reveal, with Adidas and Augusto.

 BurgerFuel website by Psychoactive Studios

BurgerFuel

Digital refresh for one of New Zealand's most established burger brands, across NZ, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

 Zendetta WebGL documentary by Psychoactive Studios

Zendetta

Multi-award-winning WebGL documentary telling the story of Syrian activist Karam Alhamad.

 Good Shepherd Entertainment platforms by Psychoactive Studios

Good Shepherd Entertainment

Multi-year publisher partnership: platforms and game-launch sites built each year.

 Talent Army brand-led website by Psychoactive Studios

Talent Army

Brand-led redesign for an NZ and AU tech-talent agency scaling internationally.

 Hellboy: Web of Wyrd game-launch site by Psychoactive Studios

Hellboy: Web of Wyrd

Game-launch site drawing directly from Mike Mignola's original comics. Built with Good Shepherd.

Full portfolio: psychoactive.co.nz  ·  Personal: andrewhillstead.com

showreel_60s.mp4 · psychoactive studios · click for sound
00:00 / 00:00
How this page was made

The workflow is the résumé

Your JD asks for fluency in AI-native tools and real shipped work. So here's the receipt: this page, end to end, directed by me and built with Claude Code.

01
Studied the role

Pulled the JD apart and mapped every requirement to evidence. The page structure is that mapping.

human judgement
02
Reverse-engineered the brand

Claude Code browsed jasper.ai, read computed styles, and extracted your colour, type and layout system into design tokens.

claude code + browser
03
Fact-checked every claim

Verified each case-study stat against current sources before it was allowed on the page. Corrected two of my own assumptions in the process.

claude code + search
04
Designed and built in one motion

No static mock. Copy, layout and interaction were drafted, critiqued and refined directly in code, the way I believe small teams should work now.

human + claude code
05
Shipped

Deployed to production and pointed at this subdomain. Idea to live URL in a day, at a quality bar I'd put my name on. I just did.

vercel
#00063D
#FA4028
#FFE8E2
#E6FFD9
#CEEBFF
#81CBFF
#FFF7F5

design tokens extracted from jasper.ai · serif display / grotesque body / mono labels · sharp corners · 1px ink borders

Built on the Claude API

This page is a working system

The cursors you spoke to are generated live, governed like a design system. On brand, on the record, with no invented facts.

This is where the web is heading. Not pages that describe work, but systems that perform it.

This page is my prototype of that future. Building it, for a product marketers already trust, is the work I want to lead at Jasper.

Logistics

The practical stuff, up front

Timezone

Based in Wellington, New Zealand. NZ mornings overlap cleanly with US afternoons, and I'll work whatever hours the team needs. Early calls and late calls genuinely don't bother me.

Relocation

Open and ready. Australia immediately (New Zealanders need no visa), or the United States if that works better.

Remote-first

I've led a distributed creative team for eight years. Async-by-default, high-trust, feedback-driven. Your operating model is the one I already run.

Let's talk.

If any of this resonates, I'd love a conversation about where design at Jasper goes next.

Email Andrew andrew@psychoactive.co.nz linkedin.com/in/andrewhillstead