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In captivity I design and engineer with and without AI interference; in the wild I birdwatch, acclimate & exercise shelter dogs, cruise bikes, dink pickleballs, and compile songs.

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Ken Jones

Ken Jones outdoors in a striped shirt, in front of a teal mural

I’m a design engineer based in Kansas City. Design engineer? In practice it means I take both the design and the code a little too seriously, and I’ve been doing some version of that for over fifteen years. Full website and landing page designs, frontend builds, and a lot of headless CMS work, mostly Sanity. I got good at it and spent enough time helping people in the community that Sanity hired me to do it.

Before Sanity I co-founded an agency and ran it for seven years, leading creative and engineering. We were a lean team that built entire websites. The frontend always, the backend when it was needed, and the part nobody lists on a website, which is sitting with a client until you understand what they’re actually trying to do, then teaching them how to run it once it’s live. These days that client has often already built half of it with Claude Code or Codex, and the job is knowing what to ask for next.

Away from the screen I’m a mostly-chill birder. The ticker up top is a list of my most recent , and I will occasionally rearrange my entire morning upon receiving a notification that a rare bird has been spotted nearby (yes, I get rare bird notifications). The other thing that gets my attention is shelter dogs. I volunteer, I foster, and I take “Dog Day Outs” with nervous pups who need a better writeup than “I’m shy”. Otherwise I make electronic music, play a lot of pickleball, and keep a house full of plants that are, against reasonable odds, mostly still alive.

Say hello

What I Do

I never wanted to pick between design and engineering. For a long time that read as indecision, and I got told more than once to specialize. As I gained more experienced this “” really started to become what made me a unique asset to teams and companies

Design

Interface design (I love me some Figma), and the systems underneath it: font faces, colors, components, the rules that keep a product looking like one product.

Frontend

Svelte/SvelteKit (my personal favorite), and React/Next.js, Vue/Nuxt, or Astro. Frameworks are like car makes: the controls move around, but the driving and the getting to your destination mostly stays the same. I'm happy to utilize different frameworks. I care most about the parts people feel and see: how fast it loads, if buttons feel clickable, how the app behaves on a phone, whether it works without a mouse.

Content architecture

I specialize in Sanity, but Im happy to bring my CMS expertise to other CMSes. The main goals are modeling content so it survives the next redesign, building the editing side so nobody has to paste the same thing in four places, or wonder which field takes the site down. Also baking in AI automations and workflows to reduce time to production while ensuring proper safeguards. Agents should be able to make content changes with the same brand guidelines, tone of voice, and safeguards.

AI build rescue

You built it with Claude Code or Codex and it works, sort of. The CSS is fighting itself, it's slow to load, the experience changes from page to page, and every fix breeds two more. I've done design and frontend for a long time, and I build with these agents daily. I can see what's off and fix it properly, then set up the rules, context, and skills in your repo so what you build next comes out right.

Technical direction

Which stack, which platform, what to skip for now, and what to do with the choices someone already made. Before a build, mid-build, or three years into one.

My Experience

Most recently, three years inside Sanity.io, where my job was helping spread knowledge to ensure success on the platform. Half of that was teaching; the other half was building tools, templates, starter kits and libraries, so nobody had to begin from an empty folder.

Before that, seven years at AllDay.io, the agency a friend and I started, designing, building, and maintaining websites for people whose businesses relied on them.

Sanity.io
2023–2026

I know this CMS from the side that builds it, more about Sanity.io

Solutions engineering first, then developer education

I joined as a Solutions Engineer, helping enterprise teams work out whether Sanity fit and then making it fit. Later I moved to developer education, building the starter kits, examples and docs developers learned the platform from.

AllDay
2015–2023

Two people, no account managers, more about AllDay

A web agency I co-founded, start to close

A two-person web agency I started with a friend: he ran sales and strategy, I designed and built. Sites businesses ran on, built on a well-structured CMS so editing pages and launching new ones didn’t need a developer on hand.

Thoughts & Learnings

Things I've Built

  1. 01 Sanity framework templates Starter kits Official starter templates pairing Sanity Studio with frontend meta-frameworks: Next.js, Nuxt, Astro, and SvelteKit. 2026
  2. 02 Sanity use case starters Reference builds Full reference builds for the hard things people do with a headless CMS: an AI shopping assistant, AI email campaigns, agentic localization. 2026
  3. 03 Sanity Functions recipes Official, ready-to-copy serverless functions for Sanity users. I wrote several of them and helped maintain the library. 2025
  4. 04 AllDay Agency The web agency I co-founded and ran for seven years. I built the site, the brand, and everything on its work page. 2023
  5. 05 Birdables Side project Collectible bird trading cards I designed during COVID. Every card designed in Figma and printed on 100% recycled paper. 2021

Say hello

Whether that's a project, a role, a thing you built with an AI that's gotten away from you, or a question about something on here. I answer everything.

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