About

About David

I’m David Flemate. I started building web pages when Netscape Navigator brought the graphical web to everyone. // dadalab became my own little corner of the internet not long after. This page is about me, the person behind it.

Journalism roots

David, arms out in a leather jacket, leaping over a floor spread of Insider magazine covers. A one-color halftone print, around 1990.

Photographer: Tom Van Dyke. Thanks, buddy!

Tom set up and took this image inside the San Jose Mercury News photo studio. It had a white painted curve backdrop to eliminate shadows. Tom stood on a ladder to get above me and had me jumping off some boxes.

Sadly, the original photo and many others were lost in a shipwreck. Happy to report, Tom is still sailing, and I’m still making stuff happen with content and design.

I came to content design through publishing and later advertising. That led to building brand systems, marketing, and e-commerce, back when CD meant Creative Director. Done that too.

That path is why I look at the whole experience, not only the words. What is the customer trying to do, what’s in their way, and what does the business need to be true?

I work in the prototype, not in a separate document, so partners can see how a word, a choice, or something left out changes the experience at each step. When a decision stalls, I bring research and analytics so the trade-off rests on evidence rather than opinion.

Most days that means working alongside product managers, UX and visual designers, engineers, researchers, legal, and marketing. I’m comfortable in the room where the roadmap gets decided, and just as comfortable in the copy deck.

// dadalab is also where my own experiments live, a knowledge base prototype and a text-to-speech tool built for this site.

Where I’ve worked

  • ServiceNow, Senior Content Designer · Sep 2025 to Mar 2026
  • Intuit, Content Designer, People Experience Solutions · Sep 2024 to Nov 2024
  • Autodesk, Principal Content Designer · Jul 2019 to Feb 2024
  • Intuit, Content Designer, QuickBooks Online · Aug 2018 to Mar 2019
More
  • Wells Fargo, Content Strategist · Aug 2017 to Aug 2018
  • Informatica, Web Marketing Editor, contract · Jun 2017 to Aug 2017
  • PayPal, Content Strategist and Product Designer · May 2016 to Apr 2017
  • Kaiser Permanente, Senior Content Strategist, contract · Dec 2015 to Apr 2016
  • Razorfish, Senior Content Strategist, contract · Apr 2015 to May 2015
  • Before 2015, Brand, marketing, and e-commerce roles

The work itself, grouped by discipline, is on the content design page.

Let’s talk

Hiring for content design or content strategy, or have a hard problem in mind? I’d like to hear about it.

Book a call Send your brief