hello, world.
My name is Burton Rast, and I'm a design leader, mentor, artist, investor, and public speaker. I'm passionate about solving unmet human needs in new ways, with new technologies.
I am presently open to design leadership roles where I can affect human-centered product solutions via emerging technologies, mentor and guide teammates, and foster a collaborative, design-driven culture.
I owe a debt of gratitude to the mentors who generously guided me from starving artist punk kid to design leader. As such, I feel a personal responsibility to pay it forward, and I'm at my very best when I'm advising and growing the next generation of design leaders.
I currently serve as a Design Partner at Strange Ventures. We partner and collaborate with early-stage creative AI startups as their ideas progress from strange to transformative. I also consult with clients regarding AI strategy and product development, and I teach AI Prototyping workshops for companies, students, and startups around the world.
Previously, I spent five years in UX Leadership at Google, where I led the creation of a design system for private modes across the company's flagship products: Search, Maps, Chrome, and YouTube. The project was a multi–year effort requiring partnership across innumerable disciplines, teams, and time zones.
I have long affected and advocated for a collaborative design culture through my work. As an instructor for Google's Sprint Leadership Academy, I taught the design sprint process to teammates company-wide, and I mentored more than 20 colleagues across a dozen product teams.
Prior to Google, I spent seven years as a Principal Designer at IDEO, where I led project teams, designed and hosted weekly mentorship workshops, and worked to elevate literacy in emerging technologies both within IDEO and our clients' organizations.
For more than a decade, I've been honored to lecture at conferences, companies, and universities, both home and abroad, about my work, my story, and the philosophies that inform my identity as a designer and leader. I am represented by Luminary and Chartwell Speakers.
I'm also a tireless creator of unintentionally moody imagery. My photographs have been featured by Apple, NBC, PetaPixel, Fstoppers, designboom, Cult of Mac, and CNN, among others.
Worth noting: I'm still very much a maker, and this site has a super fun stack.
- IDE: Cursor + Claude 4 Sonnet
- Intro: threejs + custom WebGL shaders
- Animation: GSAP + custom SVG filters
- Narration: ElevenLabs API + Web Audio API
- Styling: Tailwind CSS
- Accessibility: ARIA + keyboard & screen reader support
I believe — as I have for the whole of my career — that to lead in this space, I must know how to create for this space.
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Formerly, I served on the Board of Directors at AIGA Chicago. And I cook a mean omelet; so mean, in fact, that I once made them for the entire IDEO Chicago studio.
For case studies and conversations, feel free to reach out via the below links.