I'm Martin Tejeda. Born and raised in San Diego, and now residing in Salt Lake City where I'm slowly turning into a snowboarder and a fly fisherman.

My design career started at a creative agency called Underbelly. People hear agency and picture a room full of designers, but we had four departments — design, marketing, development, and video production. During my free time I used the cyc wall to sharpen my photography and videography skills.

After two years I took a risk and branched out on my own. I ran a one-person studio and offered research, design, and development. Along the way I built internal tools to speed up my workflow. Transcript Shield is the latest, a tool that cleans up interview transcripts and strips out the PII before they get used in AI analysis.

AI was a big part of why the one-person setup works. Over time I built a tight research-to-design-to-development workflow that let me move faster and get work to clients sooner.

Design, copywriting, engineering, and support are links on the same chain. A customer experiences all of it at once and doesn't care which team owned which part.

The tradeoff with contract work was seeing that chain from the outside. You're with a team for a finite amount of time. On shorter projects, you hand it off and leave before you get to see how it performed in the real world.

I'm dedicating the second half of 2026 to finding an in-house role where I can stay with a product and a team past the handoff. If you're looking for a design generalist who cares about the craft as much as the overall company direction, reach out and we can chat over a virtual coffee.