NOTHING GREAT IS only ONE THING.

web agency

→ Product design

→ UX/UI design

→ Web design

→ Brand design

Approach

Approachable but premium. Fast but trustworthy. Global but unmistakably from somewhere.

The brands people love hold two opposing things at once, on purpose. The ones that struggle hold two things by accident — and can't tell which is winning. Most design work tries to resolve the tension. That's how you get products that are clear but forgettable, or distinctive but unusable. The better outcome is a tension held deliberately, made load-bearing. Naming the contradiction is most of the work. Designing something that holds it is the rest.

Services

Find the contradiction

Research, audit, and strategy for teams whose product or brand isn't cohering. Usually because two or more true things are pulling against each other

→ Positioning, product strategy, UX audit, research

Design something that lasts

Product and brand systems built to carry opposing demands — power and simplicity, openness and control, speed and trust.

→ Product design, web design, brand identity

Make it travel

Brands and products that work in one market rarely survive translation intact. Meaning has to be rebuilt, not converted.

→ Global brand platforms, bilingual design leadership

My work

Project

LegalOn's AI Brand Platform

Global Brand & Product Platform

LegalOn built Japan's leading legal AI, then expanded into a broader suite of AI-powered business products. The new platform had to hold two opposing demands at once: one coherent global identity across seven products — LegalOn, SalesOn, CorporateOn, WorkOn, CXOn, DealOn, GovernOn — and enough room for each to stand on its own. The resolution was the "ON" concept: always on, always intelligent, always working — a shared lockup carried by every product, each with its own palette and identity.

See Project →

Project

Adobe Express Photos

0-to-1 AI Product Design

Adobe wanted to democratize image editing. Adobe's new AI-powered desktop image editor transforms complex editing into one-click operations, making professional-quality enhancement accessible to marketers, SMBs, office workers, and consumers.

See Project →

Project

Adobe Express Enterprise Platform

Embed SDK + Plugin Ecosystem

Adobe Express needed to scale beyond a standalone tool into an enterprise-ready, embeddable platform. I led design for the Express Extensibility team, shaping embedded editors, SDK integrations, and a governed plugin marketplace.

See Project →

Project

Modular Suite for XD

Design Collaboration Tools

Connecting the dots from collaborative ideation to rapid screen design to final presentation, Modular plugins allow seamless designer workflow in a single app. These visionary tools preceded by several years what the competition eventually released.

See Project →

Project

ADP My Aline

Financial Wellness Platform

I was tasked with creating new UX strategy and UI design to motivate payroll and cash card members to fully leverage ADP Aline services through a simple and interactive experience. Top priority was to take advantage of ADP's unique financial data to help people save and plan their finances.

See Project →

Build

Designers hand off.
Builders wait for specs.
Neither is necessary anymore.

Strategy forms in conversation with LLMs before any tool opens. Design and prototype move together, close enough to the real thing to be tested and shared without waiting for engineering. Then Claude Code, Cursor, and V0 turn it into shipped product. No handoff. Five projects live, from a Figma plugin to an interactive art piece built in a day.

See the projects →

Start with the strategy

Time with Claude and ChatGPT thinking through the problem, the user, and the product logic. Writing prompts, pressure-testing ideas, getting to a clear point of view before a single pixel or line of code exists.

→ Problem framing, product logic, positioning

Design and prototype together

Moving between Figma and AI tools to sketch flows, screens, and interactions. Close enough to the real thing to be tested, shared, and iterated without waiting for engineering.

→ Figma, Figma Make, rapid prototyping

Ship it

Claude Code, Cursor, and V0 generate and refine working code. The build is directed, not delegated — knowing what you want, knowing when it's right, and knowing how to get there fast.

→ Claude Code, Cursor, V0, deployed product

Origin

A merchant sells a spear that pierces any shield,
and a shield no spear
can pierce.

Someone asks what happens if you use one on the other. He has no answer. I do. My parents named me Lance Shields. Mujun, 矛盾, is the Japanese word for contradiction, and it comes from that parable. It traveled from China to Japan and became an everyday word. It never made it into English at all. Same story, three markets, three fates, which is the global brand problem in miniature and the work I've spent twenty years doing on both sides of the Pacific.

About me

Founder and principal designer of Mujun Studio, collaborating with companies in the U.S. and Japan on brand, product, and innovation.

Twenty years of brand, product, and platform work at scale. Design leadership at Adobe and Walmart; brand and product work with LegalOn, Visa, Hitachi, and Red Bull. Mujun works hands-on, owning the hard problems and building alongside product and engineering rather than handing off. Most engagements start with a contradiction the team hasn't named yet.

540M+

Users and visitors interacted with my design in Walmart app

114%

Increase of monthly active users from my strategy

Increase in add-on discovery and use in Express

Connect with me to explore your project's potential.