Ryan Cates

Creative Engineer

Code. Design.Taste. Vision.

Ryan Cates in a cap and glasses, crouched with a camera in a sunlit rock alcove in Joshua Tree

I trained as a designer.Then spent eight years on the production side.For most of that time, those were two different jobs.Now I design in the medium I ship in.

Code, prompts, and lately Figma again, now that it can talk to the build.

The Agent Analytics hero with the folder-tab subnav attached to the frame

Sole designer and builder

Pendo for Agents

A product family I designed and built in the browser, with no other designer on it.

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A still of the Headless Pendo section on its pink gradient

Design partner

pendo.io homepage

Pendo's homepage, designed and built around a story that kept changing until the day before launch.

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The live novus.ai hero with its dither squares in the brand grid

Precision implementer, then design partner

Novus

novus.ai, built twice: once pixel-perfect from an agency design, then from an AI concept to the page that's live now.

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The serif hero headline with its one italic word, in charcoal and coral

Self-initiator

Same craft, new floor

A campaign nobody asked for, taken from idea to finished landing page in one evening.

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