Portfolio · 2026
Earl
Carlson
Product design leader
About me
I lead design teams on products people actually use.
I give senior designers room to lead, I stay close to the product, and I push the work until it's excellent. Consumer products, connected hardware, platforms, trust and safety, and emerging technology.
Now
Senior Product Design Manager, Docker · 2024–2026
Led
A 12-person design org [confirm: 10 designers, 8 Staff?]
Based
Ann Arbor, MI · remote
Also
DJ, music, ceramics, surfing
Where I've worked
2010–13
Neighborland
DFA · Skuba
2013–14
Wikia
2014–15
Nokia
2015–17
DigitalOcean
2017–18
Facebook
2019–22
DigitalOcean
2022–24
Sabbatical:
music, art
2024–26
Docker
DigitalOcean: grew design from 8 to 16 and led across five business units as it became a public company. Nokia: sole designer on REBEL, an outdoor adventure camera (Best of Behance).

01 · Docker, 2024–2026

Moving a design team into the age of agents

Docker · the space I managed
Docker Hub
The first major redesign in 5+ years
Docker Desktop
[one line]
Agentic products
Delegation, approvals, sandboxes, staying in control
Accounts & billing
$13.6M net-new ARR · 75K+ migrated subscriptions
Design system
76% fewer theme overrides · Storybook, Chromatic, a11y checks
The team
12 people · Staff-heavy · 2 design-system engineers
How the team moved, 2024–2026
Engineering picks up Claude Code A few designers dive in: the agentic surface A design system built to be read by agents Fast trials: Figma Make, Claude Code, v0… 2024weekly show-and-tell check-ins2026
"We're not in the time of optimizing how to use Figma. The rules are changing every week."
Whole team in
Claude Code
~/hub-details-page
> claude
● Reading design-system tokens…
● Building image page from components
● 3 variants ready at localhost:5173
> make the pull command the first thing people see
● Updated variant B…
Designer
Designer
Earl
The room
Every week, someone showed what they were trying.
No mandate. I asked the three or four designers who were already excited to each take a different front, then had them teach the rest. Designers who struggled got a peer, not pressure.
What changed
~0 → all
designers working primarily in Claude Code, in about a year
2
design engineers joined; an agent-ready design system shipped
76%
fewer theme overrides after rebuilding the design-system foundation
"We changed how the organization approached product work. It's not about catching up, it's about shifting the way design works so that the impact of design remains true."

02 · Docker Hub, 2025–2026

Redesigning Docker Hub around how people actually arrive

Docker Hub · snapshot
What
The first major redesign of Docker Hub in more than five years
Scope
Discovery, comprehension, and how the Docker ecosystem fits together
Design
Sean Brady, Staff designer, led Hub Vision
My role
Set it up as research before redesign, pushed it from showing everything to showing what matters, reviewed it through six rounds, took it to leadership
What we learned first
Most people never see the homepage. They land on an image page, straight from search.
So every page has one shot to say what matters. The old "entire catalog of everything" homepage was built for a front door almost nobody used.
The process
We defined what the product should feel like before designing it.
A visual-principles workshop with the team: keywording, grouping, voting. Clean, focused, user-oriented, intentional, then refined into principles every screen had to answer to.
docker hub
Search images, extensions, and agents
ExploreSign in
nginx
Official build of Nginx.
docker pull nginx
PULLS
1B+
TRUST
Docker Official
UPDATED
2 days ago
TAGS
latest · stable · alpine · 1.27

WORKS WITH
Compose · Kubernetes · Agents
Where it's going
Six rounds of Hub Vision, presented to leadership, now setting the direction for the Hub roadmap.
On the roadmap now
Homepage searchImage details pageAgent-friendly HubVisual refresh
Live prototype: hub-vision.vercel.app/prototype [now password-protected]

03 · Facebook, 2017–2018

Fighting misinformation on a feed of a billion people

News Credibility · snapshot
Role
Lead Product Designer
Team
2 product designers (with Cat Audi) · 4 engineers · 1 researcher · 1 content strategist · 1 PM
Surface
News Feed · 1B+ monthly users · web, Android, iOS
Context
A new team, formed the week I joined, as "fake news" became a global crisis
What I brought
I designed the fact-checking tool.
Partners like Snopes rated stories, and a rating reduced a story's reach across Facebook.
I brought publishers in.
I met the New York Times, CNN, and others to introduce the fact-checking and A/B testing tools.
I pushed for credibility signals.
Publisher logos and credibility indicators that landed across the product.
I made the research actionable.
I condensed field research into product direction, and pushed that our fix was too US- and Euro-centric.
Publisher variants: bringing the source into the story
Credibility indicators in publisher tools: ethics, corrections, ownership
Research · India
"Snopes isn't covering stories in Brazil or India."
Research in Hong Kong, Brazil, and India, where I joined the team, showed that the problem looked completely different outside the US and Europe. People got their news in group posts and WhatsApp groups, and that reshaped where the work went next.
Results
~80%
drop in views once an article was rated as containing misinformation
25
fact-checking partners across 14 countries
Shipped
publisher logos, About This Publisher, and Trust Project credibility indicators
And journalist-safety tools, started after a journalist told us Facebook wasn't safe to post on.
What my designers say
[Testimonial: request from a designer]
Name · Staff Product Designer, Docker
[Testimonial: request from a designer]
Name · Designer, DigitalOcean
[Testimonial: request from a peer or partner]
Name · Role
Thank you
Let's talk.
Earl Carlson
theearlcarlson@gmail.com · Ann Arbor, MI (remote)