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Blog · Thoughts
Things I've
been thinking about.
Design, civic tech, esports, and the work behind the work.
Why the design-dev handoff is killing your project
The real reason your website never looks like the mockup — and how to fix it.
Leonel Gomez
What 8 years designing for nonprofits taught me about visual trust
Funder-ready design isn't about looking fancy. It's about looking credible.
Leonel Gomez
Data is the brief: how I turned Census numbers into civic campaigns
A look at using US Census Bureau and Pew Research data as a design starting point.
Leonel Gomez
Building the Craftly Studio brand from scratch — what I learned
Behind the decisions behind the brand: logo, color, voice, and what I'd do differently.
Leonel Gomez
Pseudo-3D illustration on the iPad: my workflow and why it works
How I developed a rare illustration style that most designers haven't touched.
Leonel Gomez
What launching QLeague taught me about community design
Building the first Dominican-American esports league wasn't just event planning. It was systems design for a culture.
Leonel Gomez
Designing funder-ready annual reports: what nonprofits get wrong
After 6 years of DUSA annual reports, I know exactly where nonprofit design loses funders before they finish page one.
Leonel Gomez
Email marketing for civic campaigns: what I learned reaching 2.1M voters
Running Mailchimp for a major GOTV operation teaches you things no email marketing course will.
Leonel Gomez
The designer-developer hybrid: why most people do it wrong
Being a designer who codes is not the same as being a hybrid. Here's the difference.
Leonel Gomez
Gaming as civic infrastructure: the QLeague experiment
Can you build a voter registration pipeline through a fighting game tournament? We tried. Here's what happened.
Leonel Gomez
Districts drawn equal in people. Are they equal in voters?
A civic-data study, told as a story — from a Census pull to a 172,127-voter gap, and what it can and can’t tell you.
Leonel Gomez
RequestWave: one person, brand to backend
How a white-label client portal for agencies got designed, built, and shipped end to end — no handoff, and no tenant ever leaking into another.
Leonel Gomez
QLeague: building the first Dominican-American esports league
Brand, magazine, site, and 18+ binational events — how a diaspora got its own league, and got a government to name it.
Leonel Gomez