Dana J. Wright

I’m a self-taught programmer and product designer with ten years of professional experience.

I graduated from The George Washington University in 2010 and had various writing jobs for a few years before I decided to pivot to programming. I did a coding bootcamp called General Assembly, Web Development Immersive where I learned front end technologies like html, css, jquery, node.js, and backbone. This was before react was invented. My first programming job was for a web development agency where I built prototypes for clients, while also continuing to mess around and build my own projects on the side.

In 2014, one of those side projects turned into an app called StockIQ, which my brother and I built in a few weekends. We submitted it to a couple startup accelerators and to our surprise we were accepted into 500 Startups. There we were advised to scale the app and try to pump up our growth metrics to attract investment. Unfortunately, StockIQ was not technically ready for scale. My brother used scrapers to fetch stock data from a number of free sources that were pretty unreliable. With the app plagued with bugs and no clear path to revenue, we called it quits and moved on after about a year.

I did get a really good lead though from someone at 500 Startups, which turned into a Product Design role at Facebook. There I worked on an elite team of designers, engineers and content producers to redesign facebook.com/business.

I got into bitcoin during the 2013 bull run. I was on the wrong side of the block size war, sold the bottom in 2014, bought the top in 2017, and became a long term holder and true believer. I’ve been in the crypto space full time since 2021, attending conferences, competing in hackathons, and working as a full time product designer for BitPay and currently design lead at derive.xyz.

At this stage in my career, my specialty is designing complex financial dashboards that facilitate a vast array of tasks. The trading platform I’ve worked on for the last three years is unapologetically data-dense, surfacing everything a trader could ever want to know about options contracts in a way that’s intuitive, at least to them. It’s been both challenging and rewarding to work at this intersection, making an overwhelming amount of data legible and useful while staying true to the complexity underneath.

With this experience under my belt, I feel at home designing high-quality, consumer-facing fintech — neobanking, lending, payments, personal finance apps, or wallets. I have the ability to translate complex financial and credit concepts into simple, intuitive, mainstream-friendly user flows. I like working in fast-moving, founder-led environments where designers are expected to own outcomes and ship quickly. I collaborate well with product, engineering, and marketing teams, and can contribute across all three if needed.

I can create scalable desktop and mobile design systems, including components, tokens, patterns, and guidelines that evolve as the product grows. I pay very close attention to visual craft: typography, hierarchy, spacing, layout, motion, and interaction detail. I can rapid-prototype an idea, conduct user research, a/b test a page or a feature, and I have a good sense for when to rely on data vs. when to use my intuition.

The products I build have a polished aesthetic and have been used by millions of people globally.