About
I’m James Darin Jackson, a designer who builds. That mostly means I don’t hand off pictures of designs. I make the thing, or enough of it to know whether the idea holds up with real data.
Right now I’m in Charlotte, NC, leading commerce design at Daimler. It’s an old, physical, unglamorous space: warranty systems from another era, parts catalogues with millions of rows, and customers whose trucks only earn money when they’re moving. I like it a lot, I’m building for real people.
I’ve worked in gaming, automotive, e-commerce and finance, so I’ve gotten pretty good at quickly learning industries. Mostly I talk to people early and turn what they tell me into metaphors I can use somewhere else.
Recent history
Ahead for iOS
2026 —Solo builder
What matters, three times a day: your calendar, reminders and how you slept, put together on your iPhone. Version 2.0 is free, with no account and nothing leaving the phone. Design, code, App Store and support, all of it built by me.
App Store ↗Loops for iOS
2026 —Solo builder
A notebook for the problems you need to think through. No AI, no reminders, no streaks. It holds your thinking until you come back. It looks like letterpress on cotton paper, with light that moves when you tilt the phone.
App Store ↗Daimler
2025 —Lead Designer, Commerce
One of 3 designers on the billion-dollar e-commerce and truck management platform: I own requirements, build prototypes and design screens on occasion with weekly crit from the wider design team. 1,700+ parts suppliers, about 15 user roles, and a firm rule that we don’t play favorites. So far I’ve taken 12 design proposals through 9+ cross-functional reviews, and 83% were adopted.
Xbox
2021 — 2025Senior Designer, Developer Tools
I owned design across the “develop” part of the game developer journey: dev tool onboarding, building and refinement, player engagement and analytics. I worked embedded with 8 engineering teams across 12+ products, and shipped Xbox PC Remote Tools among others.
Write-up ↗
Before that: product designer at TrueBlue on JobStack (2020–2021), designer at Wunderkind on e-commerce conversion work for Nike and J.Crew (2017–2020), and web developer at TriMark Digital (2013–2017), which is where the building started.
Get in touch
Email is the fastest way to reach me. I’m happy to talk about designing around old systems and shipping software by myself.