# Pete Nawara — Creative Technologist > Pete Nawara is a creative technologist who designs and builds digital products, interfaces, and durable systems from concept to working form. ## Profile Pete Nawara is a creative technologist interested in useful systems with strong visual character. He moves between product strategy, interaction design, frontend engineering, and the infrastructure that keeps a product working. His recent work includes tools for creative practice, participatory experiences, and small businesses—often taking an idea from a blank page through a functional release. ## Working method 1. Product logic — clarifying the problem, shaping the flow, and deciding what belongs before pixels arrive. 2. Visual direction — building an interface language with a distinct voice, useful hierarchy, and restraint. 3. Technical execution — turning the direction into responsive, accessible software that holds up in use. 4. Durable systems — structuring content, data, and components so the whole system can evolve coherently. ## Contact - Email: hello@petenawara.com - GitHub: https://github.com/petebot - Canonical portfolio: https://www.petenawara.com/ ## Selected project case studies ### Fritz A private iPhone care companion that turns fast household logging into a trustworthy shared memory, explainable patterns, and calm next steps. Fritz is a native household pilot for recording a puppy’s care in seconds, coordinating handoffs, and learning from evidence without turning uncertainty into false precision. - Category: Native care product - Role: Product strategy · Research synthesis · Interaction design · Brand system · iOS engineering - Timeframe: August 2026—Now · Private pilot - Technology: SwiftUI, ActivityKit, XCTest - Canonical page: https://www.petenawara.com/projects/fritz #### The moment that shaped it Fritz began with a very physical constraint: a caregiver standing outside with a puppy, a leash, and only a few free seconds. The household needed to remember who had taken him out, whether anything happened, how long he had slept, and what might matter next. A conventional pet dashboard would have added work at exactly the wrong moment. The product therefore starts with capture. Common events take one tap; compound reports can be spoken or typed in natural language. The interface retains the original wording, proposes structured events, and asks a question only when ambiguity would materially change the record or guidance. #### A shared memory, not another dashboard Today answers three questions in order: what is happening now, what confirmed it, and what should the household consider next. The dominant field is current state. A quieter field carries a checkpoint or trigger-based suggestion. Capture stays available without replacing the active destination. This hierarchy supports a fast handoff without requiring one caregiver to verbally reconstruct the day. Timeline holds the shared factual history, Patterns explains what the record may suggest, and Care keeps the durable profile, routine, developmental context, and safety boundaries around that history. #### Truth before prediction The difficult part was not recording a pee or nap. It was preventing a convenient interface from quietly inventing certainty. Fritz keeps occurred-at and recorded-at time, timestamp precision, reporter, location, confirmation status, corrections, merges, splits, and retractions as first-class data. A late historical event cannot replace the dog’s current state. “Possible urination” does not become a confirmed success. Quiet rest, likely sleep, and confirmed sleep can affect guidance differently. Every save is validated and promoted as a checksummed generation, with recovery behavior that avoids overwriting unreadable or newer data. #### Patterns that show their work Patterns use recent comparable observations rather than a lifetime average. Each result names its sample, window, exclusions, confidence factors, and what would improve it. When recent behavior no longer fits an earlier rhythm, the app widens or withholds the result instead of presenting a misleading midpoint. Current behavior still wins. Waking, food or water, a no-result trip, or live sniffing and restlessness can outrank a learned interval. The interface separates a routine care trigger from a statistical pattern so evidence language never launders a practical instruction into a prediction. #### Native in the moments that matter The iPhone pilot is built in SwiftUI with local persistence, dictation, notifications, and an ActivityKit extension. A Live Activity can count a deliberate potty-purpose outing upward or carry a short retry countdown, but neutral walks and play never acquire potty coaching simply because the dog is outside. The product remains local and intentionally small. There is no account, cloud sync, remote notification service, or household sharing backend yet. That boundary keeps the first pilot focused on whether the record, capture model, and guidance are trustworthy before broader infrastructure is added. #### The private pilot Fritz is a real household tool but not a public veterinary or training product. It does not diagnose illness, interpret tests, recommend medication, or replace professional care. Breed and developmental guidance are optional context, never a deterministic model of an individual dog. The screens presented here use the app’s synthetic simulator scenario. Personal event history, household details, veterinary information, and licensed source artwork remain private. #### What I owned I defined the product model, capture and correction flows, evidence vocabulary, pattern behavior, brand and design system, data-integrity contract, native application, Live Activity, notification policy, automated tests, and phone-pilot process. The work joins product strategy, interaction design, visual direction, domain modeling, and iOS engineering in one continuously tested system. --- ### Synchronic Studio A creative-practice system I use daily to connect reflection, inspiration, studio sessions, tasks, and gentle guidance. Synchronic began as a personal response to work and parenting crowding out painting; daily use has helped move my studio practice from rare sessions to a weekly rhythm. - Category: Creative practice system - Role: Product design · Creative direction · Engineering - Timeframe: August 2025—Now - Technology: SvelteKit, Tauri, Supabase, TypeScript - Canonical page: https://www.petenawara.com/projects/synchronic-studio - Live project: https://synchronic.studio/ - Source: https://github.com/petebot/synchronic #### The personal problem Synchronic began with a practical problem in my own life: work and parenting had pushed painting to the edges of my schedule. I was painting rarely, even though maintaining a creative practice remained important to me. I began building the app in August 2025 as a way to keep that practice present every day. Daily writing surfaces ideas and intentions I do not want to lose, while visible records of actual studio work make continuity easier to see. I now use Synchronic every day and paint weekly. #### Five parts of one practice The product is organized around five pillars, loosely influenced by the methods in _The Artist's Way_ and shaped around what I need to remain consistent: - Observe shows how consistently I have engaged with each part of the practice. - Practice records working sessions and photographs of the work produced. - Roam captures time spent out in the world looking for inspiration. - Tend manages tasks and offers AI-generated guidance and nudges. - Reflect supports daily journaling. Together they treat inspiration, making, maintenance, and reflection as connected parts of an artist's life rather than separate productivity categories. #### Guidance that leaves the artist in charge Tend looks for recurring signals across reflections, practice sessions, and roaming entries, then proposes grounded, specific next steps. Suggestions are intentionally gentle and practical: no productivity-hustle voice, motivational filler, or automatic changes to the artist's plans. Every generated card remains a proposal. The artist can edit, accept, dismiss, release, or complete it. AI helps surface a thread; it does not decide what the work should become. #### The working product The current SvelteKit application uses Supabase for accounts, structured practice data, images, reminders, and synchronization. Tauri packages the same product as a focused desktop application. Shared logic keeps daily records and cross-pillar summaries consistent between the web and desktop experiences. The visual language reflects a long-standing personal interest in Platonic solids and sacred geometry. Warm editorial surfaces and precise controls keep the product reflective without making everyday use feel precious or slow. #### What I owned I created the product model, five-pillar workflow, visual and interaction system, frontend architecture, Supabase data layer, desktop packaging, AI-guidance flow, testing approach, and release process. I continue to design, build, and use the product as part of the same practice it supports. Synchronic is designed for other artists, but I am currently its only user. Opening it more broadly depends on further testing and refinement. Its most meaningful result so far is personal and concrete: it has become part of my daily life and helped turn painting from a rare event into a weekly practice. --- ### Driftline An ocean-research decision workspace that makes stalled work, ownership gaps, and opportunities for support visible. Driftline translates lessons from proprietary research-product work into a fictional public demonstration of transparent attention routing and human-centered support. - Category: Research decision workspace - Role: Product strategy · Research synthesis · Interaction design · Design system · Engineering - Timeframe: 2026 - Technology: Next.js, React, TypeScript - Canonical page: https://www.petenawara.com/projects/driftline - Live project: https://mission-control-lime-eta.vercel.app/ - Source: https://github.com/petebot/driftline #### The real problem behind the fiction Driftline is a public proof of concept informed by proprietary research-product work that I cannot show directly. In that work, research scientists need a dependable process for gut-checking early ideas, collecting promising directions, developing them into sound peer-reviewed research, and eventually moving that research into products and the teams that build them. Leadership needs a different view of the same system: enough visibility to validate direction, review roadmaps, understand capacity, and recognize who needs support before work quietly stalls. #### What the research revealed My day-to-day work has included human-centered research, interviews, usability testing, product strategy, facilitation, UX design, and engineering. A recurring theme in that research is that people can feel as though they are working in a vacuum. When feedback from leadership is scarce, asking for help can feel like screaming into the void. Driftline translates that insight into a public example without reproducing the proprietary product, organization, or data behind it. #### A deliberately fictional setting I based the demonstration around Aster Bay Institute, an entirely fictional ocean-research organization. Living near Casco Bay and following scientific work in the Gulf of Maine gave me a credible imaginative setting, but I intentionally avoided pretending to represent a real institute. The product follows research from signals and evaluation through programs and field operations. The subject matter is fictional; the need for visible movement, review, ownership, capacity, and support is not. #### Support, not surveillance The central interaction is an attention queue called Waiting on You. It surfaces stalled work, identifies the current owner, states how long it has been waiting, and explains the evidence and operating rule that brought it forward. From there, a leader can offer support, assign ownership, make a pending decision, or send a human check-in. The rules remain visible instead of disappearing behind a score or opaque AI recommendation. That transparency is meant to build trust: researchers can see why something surfaced, what will clear it, and that leadership involvement is an accountable part of the process. #### The design direction I designed Driftline to feel like an instrument for technical work: tactile, precise, and quick. The side-rail navigation, compact information hierarchy, immediate responses, and restrained motion borrow from older scientific instruments without becoming nostalgic. The larger goal is to display dense information intelligently while preserving a consistent, legible system. #### What I owned I created the public proof of concept from scratch, defining its workflow, fictional data, information architecture, interaction model, visual system, and working Next.js implementation. The product thinking is informed by deeper research and testing in my professional work, but Driftline itself has not been presented as a tested client product. It is a focused visual demonstration of how I approach complex operational systems. --- ### Let’s Worm A literary-art collaboration with more than 100 works—and a curated digital home built for its stories, illustrations, and worms. Since 2017, writer Dan Murphy and I have prompted one another through stories and images; the current site gives a selected part of that long-running exchange its own editorial identity. - Category: Editorial art platform - Role: Illustration · Editorial collaboration · Web design and engineering - Timeframe: 2017—Now - Technology: SvelteKit, Sanity, TypeScript - Canonical page: https://www.petenawara.com/projects/letsworm - Live project: https://www.letsworm.com/ - Source: https://github.com/petebot/letsworm #### The beginning Let’s Worm began in 2017 as a creative exchange between writer Dan Murphy and me. Dan had a Tumblr for his stories and would ask me to illustrate them. Over time, the collaboration loosened into a broader way of prompting one another: sometimes a story leads, sometimes an image does, and the work develops by worming around inside an idea until it becomes something neither of us would have made alone. The name also carries a small piece of our history. After staying with Dan in Brooklyn while I was living in Chicago, I drew a group of worms spelling out “thank you.” The worm became both a mascot and a useful verb for the process. #### The body of work We have made more than 100 stories, illustrations, and paired experiments together. The work moves between flash fiction, longer stories, drawing, painting, character studies, collage, and sequential images without forcing every piece into one house style. Dan leads the writing and defined most of the collection's editorial categories. I create the illustrations and visual responses, occasionally edit or offer opinions on the writing, and help shape the collaboration as it evolves. #### A home built for the idea The original Tumblr gave the stories somewhere to live, but it never fully expressed the collaboration as its own project. I designed and built the current SvelteKit and Sanity site to give Let’s Worm a dedicated identity and editorial structure. The public site is a curated selection from the larger archive—not a migration of all 100-plus works. Its logo, squiggles, paper-like surfaces, and proudly wormy details create continuity while leaving room for each story and image to set its own tone. #### What I owned I created the illustrations and visual responses, designed the identity and interface for the current site, and built its frontend and content system. My role also includes the informal editorial conversation that has sustained the collaboration since 2017. Dan Murphy is the project's writer and primary architect of its written categories. --- ### Brown Dog Inn An independent redesign that reframes a nature-based dog retreat as a calm hospitality brand with clearer first-stay and returning-guest journeys. The concept brings Brown Dog Inn’s strongest real qualities—ten private acres, small groups, overnight care, and a warm point of view—forward through a responsive site and guarded content system. - Category: Hospitality web system - Role: Independent audit · Positioning · Content strategy · Digital design · Engineering - Timeframe: August 2026 · Independent concept - Technology: Astro, Keystatic, TypeScript - Canonical page: https://www.petenawara.com/projects/brown-dog-inn - Source: https://github.com/petebot/brown-dog-inn-redesign #### Before and after The comparison below shows how I translated Brown Dog Inn’s existing public site into a calmer, mobile-first hospitality experience. The redesign preserves the strongest raw material—a nature-based retreat on ten private acres, small playgroups, glass-fronted suites, overnight care, a pool and waterfall, and a warm philosophy built around connection and hygge—while giving that story a clearer hierarchy and more focused guest journeys. The existing website made that story difficult to see. Its fixed-width layout clipped on a phone, the first screen emphasized lobby hours over the experience, long pages mixed policies with storytelling, and new and returning guest journeys repeatedly crossed one another. #### A hospitality position hiding in plain sight The redesign does not invent a new business. It reveals the one described by the original site. “Slow down. Sniff around.” translates the existing Stay in Nature idea into a concise hospitality promise, then supports it with authentic photography, concrete proof, and a quieter Maine-inn visual language. Deep pine, warm cream, inn brown, editorial serif type, and fine rules make the experience feel grounded and considered. Playfulness lives in the language and dogs themselves rather than novelty pet graphics, decorative paw prints, or a page full of cards. #### Two journeys, made explicit The service has an important operational distinction: returning Brown Doggers can reserve, while new families need to register, provide health records, and establish fit before a first stay. The redesign turns that distinction into the primary information architecture instead of leaving visitors to discover it late. The homepage leads with Plan a first stay and preserves Returning guest as a persistent secondary route. The first-stay page explains requirements and the process before presenting a form. Rates, boarding, the Inn, and visit information each have one clear purpose rather than competing inside a single long page. #### A content system with guardrails The Astro implementation pairs the public site with Keystatic. Editors can safely update approved copy, rates, requirements, hours, links, and photography. They cannot change fonts, colors, spacing, column counts, image ratios, section order, or arbitrary page structure. That boundary treats the visual and interaction system as product code while giving the business control over facts that genuinely change. Shared content collections support columns, rows, and media grids without multiplying one-off components. Light and dark appearance consume semantic roles rather than remapping individual pages. #### Beyond the marketing site I extended the concept into first-stay registration, record collection, sign-in, and a fictional returning-family account. These screens test whether the hospitality language can survive more operational work: dog profiles, upcoming stays, health-record status, actions requiring attention, and household details. The portfolio forms and account are deliberately labeled concepts. They do not authenticate, persist, upload, or send customer information. Production identity, records, and reservations would require a protected operational service separate from the public CMS. #### Current status and boundaries This is an independent redesign concept. It was not commissioned, reviewed, approved, or adopted by Brown Dog Inn, and the existing public site remains the business’s source of truth. Any business-facing release would require owner confirmation of rates, hours, requirements, policies, booking integration, and image rights. Within those boundaries, the working build demonstrates the full direction across responsive public pages, structured content, adaptive themes, accessible form architecture, and a coherent account concept. #### What I owned I conducted the website audit, synthesized the service and content strategy, defined the positioning and information architecture, designed the brand expression and component system, built the Astro and Keystatic implementation, modeled the future forms and account boundaries, and created the automated rendered-output checks. --- ### 21GRAMS A self-directed rebuild of the 21GRAMS agency site, created to make its light-and-dark world feel fluid, spatial, and accessible. This personal 2023 remake revisits a 21GRAMS concept I helped shape as Director of Experience, pairing its Essence-and-Craft story with smoother transitions, complete navigation, and keyboard interaction. - Category: Agency experience - Role: Director of Experience (original concept) · Independent design and engineering (remake) - Timeframe: 2023—2024 remake - Technology: SvelteKit, Rive, TypeScript - Canonical page: https://www.petenawara.com/projects/21grams - Live project: https://21grams.vercel.app/ #### The context 21GRAMS was a newly rebranded healthcare agency looking for an identity that felt exclusive, mysterious, and genuinely consequential. The attitude behind the work was deliberately provocative: healthcare matters more than sneakers, so its agency should not look or behave like another fashion-led creative shop. #### Finding the soul of the idea The name draws from the story of an experiment that attempted to measure the weight of the human soul. During the agency's early brand research, I connected that idea to sacred geometry and the Platonic solids. The team developed a world divided between Essence and Craft: light and dark, soul and material, ascent and gravity. We used the dodecahedron as a recurring symbol for the soul. That thinking shaped an ethereal, otherworldly web concept in which navigation was spatial and the transition between pages carried as much meaning as the pages themselves. #### The original site and the remake An external development team built the agency's original public site. I never felt its implementation fully delivered the concept: transitions were choppy, navigation lacked a complete menu, keyboard movement was absent, and accessibility had not been treated as part of the experience. In January 2023, I independently rebuilt the site as a personal design-and-engineering study. The remake was never adopted as the agency's public website. It is an archival portfolio artifact that asks what the original concept could feel like with smoother movement, clearer navigation, on-screen directional controls, arrow-key navigation, and more accessible interaction. #### Making movement feel continuous The strongest part of the remake is its page-to-page flow. Svelte keyed blocks let each route enter and leave as part of one continuous environment rather than a collection of disconnected pages. The visible arrows and keyboard controls use the same directional model, while a conventional menu gives visitors a direct route when they do not want to explore spatially. Building it became a focused study in Svelte transitions, keyed blocks, and keyboard interaction. The measure of success was not traffic or conversion—the site was not a public launch—but whether the original Essence-and-Craft idea finally felt fluid in use. #### What I owned As Director of Experience, I contributed to the original brand research, introduced the connection between the 21GRAMS story and sacred geometry, helped shape the Essence-and-Craft concept, contributed to the color story, and supported the broader brand work. For the later remake, I designed and built the complete web experience. I cleaned up and animated the Platonic-solid artwork, but another 21GRAMS creative originally drew those forms in Illustrator. The site's copy was also created by the agency team, not by me. --- ### Grande Burrito A motion-led restaurant site that gives Grande Burrito's identity and frequently changing menu a dedicated digital home. The concept translates Grande Burrito's logo and printed-menu style into a motion-led SvelteKit site with a practical Sanity editing system. - Category: Brand and web system - Role: Independent research · Digital design · Content system · Engineering - Timeframe: 2026 · In progress - Technology: SvelteKit, Sanity, TypeScript, Playwright - Canonical page: https://www.petenawara.com/projects/grande-burrito - Live project: https://grande-burrito.vercel.app/ - Source: https://github.com/petebot/grande #### The premise Grande Burrito is a restaurant in my town whose food I already enjoy. Its web presence lives primarily on social media, and I saw an opportunity to give the business a more professional home while making its most important piece of information—the current menu—much easier to find. This is a self-initiated concept. It was not commissioned by Grande Burrito and has not been presented to or approved by the restaurant. #### Researching the existing voice I reviewed the restaurant's Facebook presence, the way it communicates with customers, its posted menus, and public Google reviews. Rather than inventing a replacement identity, I treated the existing logo and printed-menu style as the source material for the site. The digital expression adds a stretched Grande wordmark, a motion-led logo treatment, clearer hierarchy, and a dedicated structure that social posts cannot provide. The animated logo is the detail I am proudest of in the current build. #### A site the owner could run The public experience is paired with a Sanity studio for maintaining menu categories, items, prices, sold-out states, regular hours, exceptions, announcements, imagery, and supporting copy. The expressive homepage hero remains locked so routine content editing cannot accidentally dismantle the central brand moment. A generated content snapshot can preserve essential public information during a CMS outage. For this speculative build, that resilience is proof of the feature and of the production thinking behind the concept—not a requirement supplied by the restaurant. #### Honest placeholders The burrito image in the current hero was generated with ChatGPT as a temporary visual placeholder. It is not presented as a photograph of a real Grande Burrito menu item. An official version would replace it with photography of the restaurant's actual food. #### Current status I researched, designed, and built the working frontend, content model, Sanity studio, validation rules, and resilience layer. Before presenting it as a real proposal, I would simplify the administrative interface, continue refining the motion, add a printable menu for customers who want to keep a copy at home, and replace the placeholder hero image with original photography. #### What I owned This was an independent end-to-end exercise spanning research, product strategy, content modeling, visual and interaction design, animation, frontend engineering, CMS architecture, and testing. The restaurant retains ownership of its existing identity; my contribution is the digital system built around it.