I am Johnny Dean and feel hairy

and study HCI + Design at UC Irvine

and a design engineer @ Bestomer

and work on cool things:

and love fashion, sofubi toys, and furniture.

and I love making stuff:

  • Jelly Prototyped some fun loading states! The app crunches through millions of photos, so I wanted to bring some joy to the wait. We call each person’s taste their “genome,” so I spun the brand’s little marks (bestoids) into a strand of DNA.
  • Jelly While debugging, I stumbled onto our 404 pages. Like the helix loader, I used the bestoids and drew scenes that feel like empty space: cobwebs in an empty house and a desert!
  • Jelly For the marketing site, I was handed a few illustrations and asked to animate them: Uncle Davis doing the hula, a strutting bird, and an OK hand. (WIP)
  • Davyback My first love! A redesigned mobile app is coming soon. I’ve since quit the game, but I didn’t want players stuck waiting between sets, so I built a Mac menu bar app that flags when the database falls out of sync, then auto-crops new cards and detects their color and set.
  • Pump Parade A 3 to 8 player workout game where everyone’s customizable 3D athlete squats, curls, and presses together. Built for the OpenAI x Handshake competition.

2026