James Davidson

Making complicated things easier to understand and use. Building lasting systems for the teams behind them.

I'm a UX designer with a visual design background, and I build much of what I design, including the publishing system behind a science magazine that reaches 1M+ people a year.

Right now I lead UX and systems work at Stanford Graduate School of Business, partnering with faculty, leadership and technical teams. I'm looking for a UX or product design role where complex information is central to the work, and design shapes how people understand it.

See the work Resume Email me
Four soft circles, one for each place James has worked, each holding a small floating card: an exhibit panel for the California Academy of Sciences, a story layout for bioGraphic, a page template for Stanford, and a tactile map for the Palo Alto Junior Museum and Zoo. One dotted purple line starts at the bottom, runs through the center of each circle, loops around through Stanford and the Junior Museum and Zoo, crosses itself at Stanford's center, and continues up toward what's next. Four soft circles, one for each place James has worked, each holding a small floating card: an exhibit panel for the California Academy of Sciences, a story layout for bioGraphic, a page template for Stanford, and a tactile map for the Palo Alto Junior Museum and Zoo. One dotted purple line starts at the left, runs through the center of each circle, loops around through Stanford and the Junior Museum and Zoo, crosses itself at Stanford's center, and continues right toward what's next.

The work

From my current work back through the places that shaped how I design.

  1. Audit board sorting 50-plus faculty websites into five shared patterns
    • Design systems
    • Information architecture
    • Content audit

    Stanford Graduate School of Business One template system for 50+ faculty websites

    Web & Graphic Designer | UX & Digital Systems · 2021 to now

    Faculty websites had to move off a WordPress host that was being retired. I designed a shared template system so faculty and staff could keep their sites up to date on their own.

    20,000+
    people a year view content I led accessibility work on
    2 web platforms
    each with sites I designed and built
    • Faculty website migration
    • Teaching & Learning Hub website
    • Presentation theme for faculty
    Read about this work
  2. The bioGraphic homepage: a grid of full-bleed wildlife photography with story titles
    • Information architecture
    • User testing
    • Front-end
    Featured case study

    bioGraphic

    California Academy of Sciences · 2015 to 2021

    A publishing system that let editors create distinctive multimedia science stories without needing a designer for every layout. I was also its primary front-end developer, from the first version through the 2018 rebuild.

    Read the case study
    600+
    stories on the same system by July 2026
    1M+
    people reached a year, per bioGraphic
    8 yrs
    on the 2018 build
    • Content taxonomy
    • Module library and templates
    • Reader testing, two rounds
    • 2018 platform rebuild
  3. A Venom exhibit wall in saturated green with an illustrated bat, live animal habitats and Digital ID screens
    • Interaction design
    • Exhibit design
    • User testing

    California Academy of Sciences Making dense science approachable for families

    Visual Designer | UX & Interaction Design · 2015 to 2021

    Beyond bioGraphic, I worked on exhibits, interactive screens and digital projects across the museum. Most of it came back to the same question: how do you make dense science approachable for a family or a school group?

    50+
    user sessions across several interactives
    Museum‑wide
    adoption of the Digital ID system I designed for Venom
    • Digital Animal ID system, adopted museum-wide
    • Interactive web map and gallery kiosk
    • Exhibit graphics, illustration and diagrams
    • Lead designer on a traveling exhibit
    Read about this work
  4. The California Dinosaur Garden's entrance panel, with illustrated dinosaurs and English and Spanish text above a table of real fossils, as visitors explore exhibit stations behind it
    • Accessibility
    • Wayfinding
    • Interactive UI

    Palo Alto Junior Museum & Zoo An accessible exhibit for children of all abilities

    Design Lead (Contract) · 2022 to 2023

    I first worked with the museum in 2022 on animal ID panels and illustrations. They brought me back to lead visual and spatial design for the Dinosaur Garden, an outdoor exhibit about California's Cretaceous period built for children of all abilities.

    3 projects
    with the museum, from animal ID panels to the Dinosaur Garden
    4 accessible formats
    braille, a tactile map, audio for every panel and multilingual panels
    • Exhibit branding and wayfinding
    • Interactive display UI with audio pronunciation
    • Tactile, braille and multilingual panels
    • Scoping the work to meet the grand opening
    Read about this work

How I work

My process changes with the problem. These are the habits that stay the same.

  1. Understand what exists

    I learn why things work the way they do before changing them. At Stanford, that meant auditing 50+ faculty sites before designing a template.

  2. Follow the evidence

    I let what people actually do guide the design. On bioGraphic, readers scrolled past interactions, so I moved the interaction into the scroll and tested again.

  3. Set people up to run it

    Clear structure and documentation help the people who run a system work confidently on their own. At the Academy, character limits and saved color systems let content managers update animal ID screens themselves.

Notebook spread working out bioGraphic's content model in pen sketches
Working out bioGraphic's content model in a notebook, before any layout. See the project

I like problems with a lot of information and a lot of different people to serve, where the answer has to be both usable and worth looking at.

James Davidson smiling in a denim jacket in front of green bamboo

Behind the work

I'm James Davidson, a designer in the San Francisco Bay Area. When I'm not designing, you'll usually find me exploring museums, outside with my family, reading a book (probably something sci‑fi), or trying whatever new technology has caught my attention.

  • Stanford Graduate School of BusinessWeb & Graphic Designer | UX & Digital Systems2021 to now
  • Palo Alto Junior Museum & ZooDesign Lead (Contract), California Dinosaur Garden2022 to 2023
  • California Academy of SciencesVisual Designer | UX & Interaction Design2015 to 2021
  • James with arms outstretched in front of a large curved wooden wall sculpture in a museum gallery

    Exploring museums

  • Selfie of James with his wife and two young sons in bright rain jackets and beanies at their front door

    Stepping outside with the family

  • A vintage Arthur C. Clarke science fiction paperback and a mug of coffee on a sunny wooden railing

    Reading, usually sci‑fi

UX and research

  • Information architecture
  • Interaction design
  • Content strategy
  • Usability testing

Systems and build

  • Design systems and documentation
  • Accessibility and legibility
  • HTML, CSS, WordPress, Google Sites
  • Figma, Adobe CC, generative AI

A few things people usually ask

How do you work with engineers and other partners?

Closely, and early. I've partnered with internal and external developers and creatives, as well as fabricators, scientists and educators. I write HTML and CSS, and on bioGraphic I was the primary front-end developer. Implementing my own designs changed how I specify them, and made my handoffs clearer.

How do you think about accessibility?

I treat WCAG standards and ADA compliance as the starting point, and look for ways to go further. That has meant accessible formatting built into Stanford's faculty templates, legibility planned into bioGraphic's grid, and braille, tactile, audio and multilingual panels in the Dinosaur Garden.

What kind of work are you looking for?

Senior UX or product design roles. I'm especially drawn to work with complex information, in education, science, creative technology or cultural organizations, and to teams that care about design systems, accessibility and close collaboration with engineering. I live in the San Francisco Bay Area and I'm open to on‑site, hybrid and remote roles.