14 years treatingdesign and engineeringas one career

I'm Kelly Warpechowski, a design engineer with 14 years of shipping as an IC. I design products and marketing sites, architect the content systems behind them, and build everything from the ground up.

How did I get here?

Timeline14 years

2012

Lightburn Agency

My first design and dev job, in Milwaukee: Tyvek wristbands, Klement's sausage, Aveda Neroli. It also introduced me to CMSs through their in-house C# system, where I taught myself to style queried data.

2013–2015

Robert Half Technology / TCG

A recruiter reached out to place me in a design role, and I requested to join them instead. With a background in web and responsive design being new, I wanted to tap into that market while it was still hot. I skipped the cold calls and recruited developers through LinkedIn using meme culture, which surprisingly increased my response rates. I ended up teaching the social approach to other recruiters, which allowed me to transition to the Los Angeles office.

2015

Digital Media Management

Celebrity WordPress builds: Cindy Crawford's personal site, Elizabeth Banks's WHOHAHA, Ashley Tisdale's The Haute Mess, and Paramount Tumblr campaigns, with editorial sites pulling 1M+ views a month.

2016

TigerText (now TigerConnect)

My first startup. All marketing design and web development for HIPAA-compliant healthcare messaging.

2017

Collide

Hired as the marketing designer at a live-streaming startup, I noticed no one was doing desktop product design and volunteered myself to try. That's where I found the love: product, users, and delighting them, the same delight as building MySpace layouts for bands.

2018

ATTN:

Microsites for Redbox and TV premieres, including an experience that converted 30k+ users in its first week. I also made my first pitch deck, a Tinder-meets-candidacy mobile app, and pitched it to the CEO of TOMS, who invested.

2019

First Media

First product design hire, doing product design as R&D: prototyping new revenue avenues for a viral food brand, including a social app for foodies.

2019–2021

TerraTrue

Everything put to the test. Hired as a freelancer until they found out I did product design. Joined full-time and made it all: the product, the design system, the emails, and my first headless WordPress build.

2021 - Present

Heartcore Studio

All of it led here: my own studio.

For the last 8+ years, I've been the technical half of a long-running agency partnership, building headless WordPress sites for luxury hospitality and real estate brands. I run that practice through Heartcore Studio, alongside my own shop, Palette Town, where I sell hand-drawn Pokémon-inspired art on a headless Shopify stack I built, complete with its own admin panel and AI editorial pipeline.

I moved to Los Angeles for the creative energy that inspires my soul. It's a feeling that everyone around you is writing the next big script or building the next unicorn startup. That's the landscape I work best in. My favorite kind of problem is when I get to spend that creative energy designing, developing, and building out content systems. My hobby turned into my career, and I couldn't have asked for a better timeline.