John Williams
I’m an interdisciplinary designer & engineer based in NYC.
As of Spring 2026, much of my work right now revolves around pushing the limits of variable fonts and exploring homemade 2D/3D sketching tools as part of a broader digital design and fabrication project to separate form from sizing in eyewear.
I’m also always down to collaborate on interesting projects, so feel free to reach out if you want to chat!
I was recently inspired by some of Maggie Appleton's writing on digital gardens and treating a personal web page as an evolving, imperfect body of work. So as of 2026 I've been migrating this site to showcase more things I've done over the years that was never really polished up for broader audiences. I've been slowly working through my old projects and writings, but in the spirit of getting comfortable building and designing in public I've also included many of them that are still being assembled.
Digital and Physical Design
Beacon Health Press Kit2025
Conference poster in the style of a '90s tech magazine advertisement
Hourglass Chair Prototype2025
Reversible dining & lounge chair with Tsugite inspired voxel joinery
Talon2025
Fidget-friendly personal note-taking jewelry
Brooklyn Loft Buildout2023
Butcher block kitchen installation, two-tiered lofted bed, soundproofed paneled walls
Gateway to a Primitive World2022
Landing page with a parallax hero created for Primitive Bits Inc
Primitive Office Buildout2022
Interior design for Primitive Bits Inc., including sourcing and custom-built maple phone booths
Printable Personas2022
Small utility allowing user research teams to generate unique persona cards based on names
The Midnight Table2022
Seven-foot-diameter red oak conference table for Primitive Bits, built exclusively at night on-site
Case Study: Wellnessie2021
Year-long UX research project on de-bundling mental health homework
Willow Intervention Builder2021
Prototype for customizing and reusing therapeutic interventions across patient populations
Breathtaker2019
Gamified spirometry app and custom hardware that turned respiratory therapy into a virtual bank heist
EDQA2019
Redesign of a decade-old, organically grown peer-protected QA system
Digital Marginalia2017
EPUB reader with portable annotations to give ebooks that used-book feeling
Political Symbolizer2017
Political philosophy quiz that represents responses with a procedurally generated sigil
Topia2017
Concept and prototype for shared augmented reality
Husky Roulette2016
A Parasitic UI and experiment in tension building with real-world consequences
Kafka2016
Visual novel where skill at minigames determines your character's ability to navigate corporate drone life
Tinybook Maker2016
Very simple editor for creating Rwandan Oksbo booklets. Created for Nathan Felde, Chair of Art and Design at Northeastern University
LAN Academy Lo-fi Mockups2014
Offline learning management system based on my meta-analysis of LMS usability research
Formative Works2008
Rickshaws, furniture, plano-convex lenses, sculpture, and other misc work from my youth
Libraries and Apps
Task Scheduler2025
Experimental plugin-based auto-scheduler using the Z3 SMT solver to prioritize tasks on a calendar
Sourcenote Windows2024
Autohotkey script to replicate the excellent Sourcenote mac app on windows
Formology2023
DAG-based form library focused on communicating complex async validation states to users
Emergency Telehealth2020
always-on webrtc video monitoring system connecting patient rooms to the pit during COVID
Rapid Epics Planning DSL2019
Minimal markup language for generating product planning documents and importing them into Jira
All Star Comments Extension2018
Chrome extension that intercepts all keystrokes and replaces them with the lyrics of Smash Mouth's "All Star."
BIDMC Form Driver2018
custom form DSL + visual editor for workform digitization in the emergency department.
“Can't Believe it's not HTML” PDF Generation DSL2018
XHTML parser written in XSLT for printing rich-text discharge instructions at BIDMC
Mumps SSR Components2018
Hyperscript-like psuedo-isomorphic component framework for MUMPS/Caché
Tinydj invoice maker2018
invoice generator for professional-feeling printable invoices from toggl
Custom Dash components2017
Create inline custom React components for plotly Dash dashboards
Hypermapper2016
Novel hyperlink network analysis tool created for my research on the digital footprints of community mappers
Simple Crawler2016
Digital social science library for writing web crawlers in literate CoffeeScript
Topsail JSON Schema Engine2016
Generate complex business applications with JSON Schemas
Harpsichord2015
A small menubar app for the CLI-averse to build and manage Harp static sites
Your NEU2015
Parasitic UI wrapping a widely-disliked student portal
Khan Downloader and neoKhanStick2014
Tool for downloading Khan Academy videos for offline use, with a convenient interactive CLI
sass-lang.com's 🔺s2014
My first PR to an open source project: adding better tab indicators to the SASS website
Additional Works
Courses2024
Bouldering Better @ Fractal University - 2024
Culture of Code @ Northeastern University - 2016
The Dictators Handbook for Teen @ MIT HSSP - 2011
Papers2018
The Evolution of Estonian E-Government: A Framework for Success in Digital Governance (2018)
Mapping Community Mappers: A Hyperlink Network Analysis of the Asian Coalition of Housing Rights (2017)
Usability Evaluations in Learning Management Systems: A User Experience Design Perspective (2014)