I'm Zaye Flowers. I've spent ten years designing products inside large organizations — GEICO, CNN, IHG, ADP, Publicis Sapient — and the last stretch building and shipping one of my own. FEZ Media is the practice I run from Baltimore.
Most of my career has been inside products where a mistake is expensive — an insurance claim someone files after a car accident, election results read by millions of people in one night, a booking page where the price has to be unambiguous. That work teaches a specific discipline: the interesting idea matters less than the thing actually finishing.
It also means I have sat through every version of the meeting where six people hold six different versions of the same project. Most of what I do now — the workshops, the audits, the facilitation — comes from having been in that room and needed a way out of it.
FEZ Media is deliberately small. You work with me directly, from the first call through the last file. That is a limit as much as a feature: I take a few engagements at a time, and I would rather tell you that than pretend otherwise.
Bookers could not work out what a room actually cost. Rewriting the payment page around that single complaint moved conversion 6% — the first time I saw clearly that scope should follow evidence, not ambition.
Portfolio reviews, mock interviews and job-search strategy, one designer at a time; 85% of them landed roles. I watched a lot of people get stuck in the same five places, which is the reason the Innovation Lab is arranged the way it is.
152 million voters' results made legible at national scale, with 4.6M+ accessibility-tested interactions. Nothing sharpens your view of clarity like knowing the whole country is reading it at once.
A phone-dependent injury claim process turned into guided self-service, with completion moving from 25.8% to 30.2%. Regulated work, where every screen has to survive legal review before anyone sees it.
I built the thing I had been telling other people to build — a daily inheritance of Black wisdom, one quote a day with the person behind it. Scoped it, designed it, built it in React Native with AI tooling, shipped it to the App Store. No engineering team and no funding.
Read the case study →Worth knowing before you get in touch, because these are the parts people are usually surprised by.
If you need something smaller than you asked for, or nothing at all, I would rather say so on the first call. There is a whole page on this site about what an app really costs, written to talk people out of building one.
I quote per engagement rather than per hour, so you are not watching a clock and I am not incentivized to be slow. The scope is agreed before we start, in writing.
What was decided, what was rejected, and why. It is the difference between a workshop that felt good and one you can still act on two months later.
I design and give technical direction; I do not take production engineering. If you already have someone who knows your codebase, that is the ideal arrangement, not an obstacle.
Designing products across insurance, media, hospitality and finance
Mentoring and managing designers
Of mentored clients landed design roles
Interactions on accessibility-tested experiences at CNN
I live in Baltimore, and I would rather the next good thing get built here. That is the whole reason the Innovation Lab exists as an evening cohort with six seats rather than a course you buy and never finish.
DC is forty minutes away and full of teams and organizations that need facilitation more than they need another deck. Same practice, two different rooms.
Tell me what you're building, who it's for, and where it's stuck.
