Thank you for visiting my small corner of the world wide web!

Fun fact: "world wide web" has less syllables than "www".

My name is Paul and I‘m a designer with a passion for building.

This is my digital workshop, garden, gallery, and notebook — it’s primary purpose is for me to learn, but I do hope it might help (or at least inform/mildly amuse) others, such as yourself.

If you have any feedback, ideas, or general questions, please don't hesitate to shoot me an email (hit M on your keyboard) or book time on my calendar (hit C on your keyboard). I’ve benefitted greatly from people taking random meetings with me, and I hope to pay it forward.

I grew up in North County, San Diego and spent 15 years living in LA before moving to Bellingham, WA — the city of subdued excitement.

Like many teenagers, I had very little idea what I wanted to do with my life. I've loved building and designing from a young age, and I spent my high school summers working in construction.

I started a pre-architecture degree in college, but that was short-lived due to the combination of basically flunking Calc II and discovering that graphic design was a thing. Thankfully, I had the self-awareness [my parents telling me] that my skills as a designer would likely not provide a living wage, I also studied business — which I thoroughly enjoyed.

While I was still in college, I learned to develop rudimentary websites and grew from there. While a few of the engineers I’ve worked with may disagree, I’ve grown to be a capable front-end developer, contributing bits of code to sites, products, and systems.

I’ve spent the better part of the last decade at an enterprise software company, where I started as the first web designer, moved into UX and product design and gradually (together with other many talented designers, led by Juan Hidalgo) built a multi-disciplinary design org.

Director of Design at Liferay

Remote

2022 — 2024

Leading a business unit of 40+ designers, working with the executive team to set strategic goals, and supporting leaders in Communication Design, Product Design, and Design Operations.

Principal Designer at Liferay

Remote

2021 — 2022

As Principal Designer, I continued to manage Product Design teams, while establishing and leading our Design Ops function. One of my key contributions was setting the vision for a new version our Design System, rethinking how a design system can add value beyond a product organization and becoming a key value prop for enterprise customers.

Senior Product Design Manager at Liferay

Diamond Bar, CA / Remote

2019 — 2021

After working with Liferay’s first Director of Design to establish design as a standalone business unit, I began managing internationally and helped grow and lead other managers.

UX Design Manager at Liferay

Diamond Bar, CA

2017 — 2019

After spending 3 years gaining a deep understanding of our product and customers in my role as Web Designer, I moved to a product team tasked with developing an MVP for an entirely new product line. I also grew the UX team based in our LA office from 4 to 8.

Web Designer at Liferay

Diamond Bar, CA

2014 — 2017

Liferay’s first web designer, I was hired to design and build pages to support our marketing efforts. I quickly took responsibility for all of our web properties and built a small team with 2 other designers.

Arguably one of the best shows ever on television — learning how things are made has always fascinated me. Hopefully you can relate, otherwise this section will be quite dull.

Built with NextJS

  • 5 years ago I built the first version of this site using GatsbyJS, and I wanted to try something new — NextJS has become an industry leader in the React space, and I wanted to see what all the fuss was about

Hosted on Vercel

  • seemed to make sense to use the host that built NextJS

Components from Radix UI and Shadcn

  • coming from ThemeUI, Radix and Shadcn both seemed like good options
  • I'm still getting used to it — I still prefer the mental model of ThemeUI? I think?

Styled with TailwindCSS

  • I've been wanting to use Tailwind for awhile, a brand new build is a great opportunity to try things
  • Again — I think I may possibily prefer ThemeUI for styling / re-use, but I've actually really enjoyed how quickly I can work in Tailwind, getting 80% of the way very quickly

Themed using TailwindCSS and Shadcn

  • I started using Radix Themes but it wasn't as immediately obvious to me how to go beyond Dark/Light themes — and Shadcn documentation had Tailwind specs that made sense to me

Informed via Fathom Analytics

  • I take privacy very seriously, but it's also useful to know what is working and what isn't, so I use Fathom — if you're similarly keen, use my referral link and we'll both benefit!

Archive

I was inspired by Jeff’s site to archive the different iterations of my site over the years.

To do this, I create branches for each version. The master branch is where the current version of the site lives. The working branch is where I'll experiment and work on major changes. The v1 branch is where the first version of the site lives. The v2 branch is where the second version of the site lives, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

To see the first version of the site built cira 2017, visit v1.paul.hanaoka.co.

Technology

Typography

  • Fira Sans
    • Open source typeface designed by one of my favorite typographers (Erik Spiekermann). Stop Stealing Sheep & Find Out How Type Works by Spiekermann was one of (if not the first) book I read on typography, and has continued to influence me to this day.
  • Charter (?)
    • TODO --> implement a serif typeface on the site.

Thanks

So many people have influenced and contributed to the design and development of this site — for which I’m incredibly grateful.