About

Hello! I’m Kyle Johnston. I’m based in the Kansas City area where I spend my days as a staff product designer at Etsy. Prior to Etsy, I ran my own design studio, flow14. Before that, I worked for a range of companies – from startups to agencies to big companies like Garmin. You can find my professional design portfolio at kylejohnston.com or check out my LinkedIn.

This site is a creative journal of things that spark my curiosity, including projects, posts, and discoveries.

What’s with the ‘IO’?

In computer terms, IO (or I/O) stands for input and output. This site represents a collection of inputs (ideas, projects I’ve built to inform my work) and outputs (thoughts and things I’ve made).

Colophon (aka how this is all made)

• Designed, developed, and written by me
• Designed in Figma · Source
• Built with Astro, a web framework I started using in 2022-ish. For whatever reason, it clicks with my brain, so it’s the tool I reach for when I need a static site that requires more than basic HTML and CSS.
• VS Code is my editor of choice. And for the first time, GitHub Copilot was pretty useful in this project.
• Cloudflare Pages hosts the site and handles automatic builds and deployments through a connection with my GitHub repo.
• Typography is IBM Plex Sans for text, Ginestra for post titles, and dashes of IBM Plex Mono because I’m a sucker for monospaced fonts.
• This version of the site (the first!) launched in June 2025.

Thanks for visiting!

A disclaimer: anything I say here represents my opinion and perspective, not those of any of current, past, or future employers.