Chevis Zhou is a design engineer who designs the product and ships it — from user research to production React, for startups that need both at once.
AethrDesign: Team-shaped work from a practice of one — because AI executes the build.
AethrDesign is my one-person web practice, run since August 2025 on a simple argument — you no longer need a team of designers and developers to ship great digital products. One person directing AI can carry strategy, design, code, and client operations end to end. The work below is the proof, and some of it is running live on this page.
Solara: Building a developer's home — API documentation redesigned end-to-end.
Solara, an open-source Python web framework, lacked the infrastructure to sell. I owned the design strategy for the documentation portal that launched into the framework's steepest growth — 170,000 monthly downloads by November 2024 — and the 100+ component design system behind it.
GMU: Can assistive technology compensate for poor web accessibility?
A capstone research project at George Mason University's Visual Attention and Cognition Lab, using Tobii eye-tracking to prove that WCAG principles are essential — not optional — for creating websites usable by everyone. When 97.4% of top websites fail accessibility guidelines, the burden falls on assistive technologies that were never designed to compensate.
