Hi — I'm Brett. I started my career at Penna Powers in Salt Lake City. After a big project wrapped, the agency went through layoffs, and I joined The Grand America Hotel as their in-house graphic designer. After that, I went back to agency life at The Orton Group and then another shop, where I was told if I wanted to make more money I'd need to start bringing in business. My reaction was pretty simple: if I was going to do that, I should probably do it for myself.
That's why I started Pixelcrane in 2010.
For the next eleven years it was both my studio and my lifestyle. I worked remotely with clients across the country long before remote work became normal, and more importantly, it gave my wife and me the flexibility to split parenting and career evenly while our kids were growing up. I got to be there for things most parents miss, and I don't take that for granted.
When my oldest left for college out of state, it felt like the right time for me to try something new too. I reached out to a freelance client and joined their SaaS company full time to see what product development looked like from the inside. I spent five years there learning ecommerce, PIM, digital catalogs, and I figured out how to use AI to normalize messy product data faster and more reliably than anyone else in th company — including our overseas data team.
By late spring of 2026, I wanted more ownership over the direction of the work I was doing, so I came back to becoming a full-time freelancer.
Pixelcrane is still intentionally small. When a project needs deeper specialist support I bring in developers, illustrators, writers, animators, IT resources, and paid-media people I've worked with for years. I'm good at translating between stakeholders. Most projects involve leadership, marketing, operations, technical teams, and customers all looking at the same problem from different angles, and a lot of the job is hearing what each of them is actually saying. Empathy is probably my best and worst asset: I take projects personally, which usually leads to better work and occasionally to more revisions than strictly necessary. And I use AI heavily and unsentimentally — it's a tool, not a teammate, and it frees up time for the parts of the work that actually require judgment.
Outside of work: my wife and I raised two boys in the Sugar House area and we've coached our kids' high school mountain bike team for several years. I make a respectable yellow curry.