Hi there. I’m June, a design leader originally from Korea, now based in the Bay Area.
I was a huge gamer as a kid. Arcade games like Space Invaders felt like actual magic, and I wanted to be part of whatever made them. That is how I ended up at KAIST, studying industrial design. The little game up there is real, by the way. Click it if you want a turn.
Last Christmas I started vibe coding, and felt that same magic again. A few prompts, and a little arcade game was just running. What got me wasn’t the game. It was how short the distance between an idea and a working product had become.
Once you can build the thing you imagined, design stops being about drawing it. It becomes about deciding what is worth building at all.
I have been vibe coding almost every day since, until I could take a real, complicated product from idea to shipped mostly on my own. Technology has surprised me twice now: once as a kid, and once as an adult who should be harder to impress. And I want every designer I work with to get to feel like this too.
My path has never been a straight line, and I have stopped apologising for it. An agency I founded in Seoul that won the country’s top web award twice, an MBA at Michigan where I was usually the only designer in the room, consulting for Fortune 500 brands, consumer products, then seven years of enterprise SaaS in cybersecurity and DevOps. On paper, five different careers.
It has never felt like that from the inside. Each one taught me something the next one needed, and none of it went away. It compounds into judgment: accumulated context, the same pattern wearing different clothes, a fair number of wrong calls, and slowly learning what matters.
One theme followed me through all of it: trust. Sometimes literal, like in cybersecurity. Sometimes quieter, like trusting a recommendation, an insight, an AI-assisted decision. And sometimes it is the team itself. Building one where people genuinely trust each other is the part I care about most, because everything else rests on it.
Trust matters more now than it used to. When a product can produce an answer in a second, the answer stops being the valuable part. Whether you can believe it is. A system people don’t trust gets checked by hand, or quietly switched off, and all that speed turns into nothing.
That is closest to what I believe about leading. A design leader’s job is not to make the decisions, but to raise the quality of the decisions everyone around them is making. Clarity, so the direction is obvious. Systems that carry it further than any one person can. Judgment that keeps growing. And staying close enough to the craft to know when something is going wrong. I would rather my designers get good at creating direction than at following mine.
AI makes that more urgent, not less. It scales output almost overnight, and judgment does not scale that way, so it has to be grown on purpose. The question is no longer what AI can do. It is what AI should decide, and what should stay human.
You can’t lead AI-native design from the sidelines. You have to build with it.
So I do. Most of that goes into Aestheria ↗︎, a design context layer for AI coding agents, now in beta with a small group of testers. It keeps me honest about the medium I am asking teams to work in.
The rest of my time belongs to three cats and one dramatically fluffy white dog, who have made it very clear that my schedule is negotiable. I’ve always loved building things, and I am still excited about whatever I get to build next.