hello, world.
My name is Burton Rast, and I'm a design leader, mentor, artist, investor, and public speaker. I'm passionate about designing and building in new ways, with new technologies. With this in mind, here are a number of things I've recently created:
- The Next Four Years is the world's first novel that uses AI to rewrite itself every day per the 24-hour news cycle. (Project detail here)
- The Anti-AI Writing Guide is a pattern-based guide for producing natural, authentic text without common AI linguistic tells that updates itself daily per Wikipedia's oft-updated Signs of AI Writing article.
- PRD Builder allows you to visually build Product Requirements Documents for use in AI chatbots and vibe coding tools. Nothing is stored on the server, all data is local and private.
- Markdown Converter is a web app that converts popular document formats into markdown format for use in AI chatbots. It is 100% private and local, your files never leave your device.
- Lightroom Coach is a natural language AI assistant that I built into Adobe Lightroom.
- Noise to Signal is a Chrome extension that uses AI to analyze all of the posts in my LinkedIn feed and flags any that are overly self-aggrandizing, spammy, or AI slop.
- Strange Sessions is a series of beautifully morphing strange attractors that I made to promote our company's recently launched speaker series.
- Invading Space is a remix of the classic Space Invaders where you're the aliens trying to blow up the cannons and invade the earth.
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.