About Me

I'm Chad Ossman, a New York City-based UX/UI designer with a broad background in web & app design, animation, film, and writing.

Me in Ireland
In Ireland, 2024. Photo credit: me, with apologies to Anton Corbijn

Hey, you scrolled, so I'll go on a bit more:

I came to a career in design tangentially. Like a lot of young people with no clear notion of what I wanted to be when I grew up, I studied literature and the humanities at Davidson College in North Carolina. I made a few student films, which pointed me to New York City, where I completed an MFA in screenwriting at the Columbia University School of the Arts.

By then, the "new media" industry was blowing up in Silicon Alley. On the back of my film school experience, and having self-taught myself Flash and web design, I found work as an animator for the streaming media pioneer Pseudo Interactive.

In the decades since, I rode out numerous corporate mergers, splits, and Dot Com bubbles. My work history includes UX design at CBS News and XO Group Inc., e-commerce design at Warner Bros., movie marketing design at New Line Cinema, the aforementioned Pseudo Programs Inc., and still more besides. I'm lucky enough to have worked with amazing teams on everything from reporting election results, to a Webby Award-winning movie promotional site, to a flagship entertainment industry e-commerce site, to a fertility tracking app.

My current most essential tools are Figma, Sketch, Nova, and WorldWideWeb. Since I've been in this racket for a long time, I also have to shout out my complicated nostalgia/love/hate for Fireworks, Flash, and Dreamweaver. It's fine and fitting that they've faded away, but I sometimes miss them anyway.

Chad playing guiter in New York City
Performing in New York City, 2022. Photo credit: Jocelyn Gonzales

Outside of work, I'm likely to be found making coffee, playing guitar (sometimes in public, for which I apologize), making more coffee, reading a science-fiction novel, making still more coffee, watching a movie, regretting how much coffee I drank, and mourning the institutions that are failing us in this time of crisis.

The only social site/app I actually use is Letterboxd, but you can also find me on BlueSky and Facebook, support musicians I listen to on Bandcamp, and network on LinkedIn. Anything not on this list: I either righteously deleted my account or snobbishly never signed up in the first place.