Thinker & Maker · UX / Product
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Currently Open to full-time roles.
Product design · UX · Front-end
Recent Work Code & Theory · Publicis Sapient
Huge · LiveArea · FlightPath
Also Building intoview.pro · emdash.click
Self-initiated tools & platforms
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zack gort · zackgort.com
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Manifesto
How you say it
is part of
what it is.
Not just what you make. Not just how it works. The way an idea moves through a person — that is the design. That has always been the design.
I
Chapter I
On Making
I think.
I make.
I made this.
Not with a team of fifteen. Not from a brief. From a decision that the thing I wanted to exist did not exist yet, so I would have to build it.
Twenty years in agencies taught me to work at scale. Startups taught me to work without permission. The years in between taught me that the best work usually happens when those two instincts are running at the same time.

The instinct to think systemically. And the instinct to just make the thing.
The portfolio you are reading is itself the work.
Chapter II · On the Sentence
Most interfaces deliver
information.
This one delivers it
in order.
There is a difference between a page that contains everything and a page that knows when to say each thing. The second one is harder to build. It is also the only one worth reading.
Chapter II continues · On the Sentence
Sentence-by-sentence navigation is not a gimmick. It is a position. The position that pacing is part of meaning.
When you read a sentence and have to decide to go to the next one, you are actually reading. You are not scanning. You are not skimming. You are present.

That is a different experience than a wall of text. And it is the experience this platform was built to create.
III
Chapter III
On Systems
A component is
not a system.
A decision is.
The pattern library is the output. The thinking that produced it — the hierarchy of choices, the names, the constraints, the things you decided not to include — that is the system.
I have built design systems for fintech platforms, enterprise SaaS, and e-commerce at scale. The artifact in each case was tokens and components. But the work was always making decisions visible so that other designers could make consistent ones.

A good system does not restrict creativity. It redirects it toward the problems that actually matter.
The interface does not ask for your attention. It assumes you brought it with you.
Chapter IV · On Commerce
A product page
is not a shelf.
It is an argument.
The argument that this thing, right now, is exactly what you need. Most product pages make that argument badly. They list features. They show specs. They trust the photograph to do the heavy lifting.
Chapter IV continues · On Commerce
Narrative commerce is what happens when you treat the product page as a story. Not a brochure. A story with stakes, with voice, with a reason to keep reading.
The sentence-progressive format was built for this. You give someone a sentence. They choose the next one. By the time they reach the call to action, they have not been sold to — they have been convinced.

There is a difference. The second one actually works.
V
Chapter V
On Craft
The detail is not
decoration.
It is evidence.
Evidence that someone cared enough to think about the thing no one will notice unless it is wrong. The kerning. The easing curve. The label that doesn't truncate at 320px.
I build in vanilla HTML, CSS, and JavaScript because frameworks are abstractions, and abstractions have a cost. When you work close to the metal, you understand why something behaves the way it does.

You also understand when to stop. Craft is not perfectionism. Craft is knowing which details change the experience and spending your attention there.
Chapter VI · On Voice
Most brands have
a visual identity.
Fewer have
a voice.
Voice is harder to systematize than color. It is the reason two headlines can follow the same style guide and one of them sounds like the brand and the other one doesn't.
Chapter VI continues · On Voice
Content strategy and UX writing are not support roles. They are design decisions expressed in language. The label on a button is an interaction. The empty state is a relationship moment.
Wolfgang & Co. was built around this premise — that brand voice is not a marketing asset, it is a product feature. When the words feel like the experience, the experience becomes something you trust.
VII
Chapter VII
On Being Self-Taught
No one taught me
to code.
That is the point.
I learned to build because I had ideas that required it. The learning was never abstract — it was always in service of a specific thing that needed to exist.
Self-teaching produces a different kind of knowledge. You do not learn the canonical path. You learn by solving problems, which means you understand why something works, not just that it does.

The downside: gaps. The upside: no assumptions about what is or isn't possible. I have built things that a formally trained developer would have told me couldn't be done that way.
They work. They're live. You're reading one now.
Chapter VIII · On the Right Problem
Most briefs describe
a solution.
The job is to find
the actual problem.
The actual problem is almost never what the brief says. The brief is a guess. The job is to find the thing beneath it — the friction, the gap, the assumption nobody has questioned yet.
Chapter VIII continues · On the Right Problem
Twenty years of agency work is, mostly, a training program in problem reframing. You learn to listen for what is not being said. You learn that the stakeholder who is hardest to read is usually the one with the most important constraint.
The best projects I have worked on started with someone willing to say: we thought we knew what we needed, and we were wrong. Let's figure out what we actually need.

That conversation is where the real design begins.
IX
Chapter IX
On Presence
Engagement is not
the goal.
Presence is.
Engagement is a metric. It tells you how long someone stayed. It does not tell you whether they were actually there — whether the thing you made reached them, changed something, left a mark.
The platforms optimized for engagement have produced an internet that is very sticky and not very good. The alternative is harder to measure: Did this matter to the person who experienced it?

That is the question this work is trying to answer. Not with user testing. With the thing itself — the pacing, the voice, the decision to give the reader a moment before the next sentence.
The act of reading this is itself an experience worth having. Not a funnel. An experience.
Chapter X · On Wolfgang
The platform is
named for
a dog.
A rescue. Someone who had no interest in what came next until he was certain about what was happening right now.
Chapter X continues · On Wolfgang
He would stop on walks. Not because he was tired. Because something was worth stopping for.
The smell of a particular patch of ground. The sound of something two streets over. The specific texture of this moment, which would not occur again.

We called it walking your dog. The practice of not rushing past the thing that is actually there. The platform is built on that instinct — the belief that slowing down is not a design constraint. It is the design.
How you say it
is part of what it is.
The pacing is the argument.
The sentence is the design.

That is what this is for.
Wolfgang & Co. is dedicated to Wolfgang, 2012–2024.
His sanctuary lives at wolfie.love
Zack Gort · wolfie.life