Eli is a San Francisco-based designer & art director leading special projects for the Sociotechnical Studio at Ginkgo Bioworks.
‍

With skills across a range of creative disciplines—including strategy, UX, and visual design—he's currently working on product design for Airbnb and Samara. Previously, he straddled the design, product R&D, and strategy teams on for Google Brand Studio—including a redesign of Google Trends.

In-between projects at Google Brand Studio, he worked as a senior designer and special projects lead for the Sociotechnical Studio at Ginkgo Bioworks—where he refined and expanded the Ginkgo design system, developed early versions of the Grow Store, and designed Jurassic Park-inspired Amber Awards. The Ginkgo Sociotechnical Studio is a multidisciplinary team designing and communicating the future of synthetic biology. Recently, the work of the studio was featured in The New York Times Style Magazine article: Designing for the Future When the Future Is Bleak.

While at Google, he's also worked as a member of the Google Brand Studio data strategy team in partnership with Google Trends and Google News Lab. The data strategy team mines insights from Google Search data to support creative work from campaigns (e.g. Most Searched) to social (e.g. Breaking Good News) to Year in Search (e.g. Year in Search 2019) to the development of new products and features.

Before joining Google Brand Studio, he worked across teams as a designer at Google Creative Lab in New York City. He was invited to join the Lab as one of the Creative Lab 5 after graduating from the Brown University & Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) Dual Degree Program, where he studied evolutionary biology and industrial design. He concentrated in Nature, Culture, & Sustainability Studies at RISD.

While in school, he was and remains the longest serving member of the RISD Design Guild, a student-run graphic design firm. Following graduation in the summer of 2017, he was selected from more than 2,500 applicants to be a Kleiner Perkins Design Fellow at Helix—a consumer genetics startup.

He’s interested in bright color, strange texture, inventive form, biological design, sustainable technologies, and creative strategy.