I'm Gary Cox. A product design and creative leader with 35 years in interactive entertainment, 30 years in art direction, and more than a decade in UX/UI leadership. At MobilityWare, I've led design across more than 24 mobile titles, overseeing portfolios of up to 6 products at a time. I bring together customer needs, product strategy, research, usability testing and analytics to reduce friction, strengthen engagement and retention, and create intuitive experiences people return to. I pair strategic vision with hands on design leadership, aligning teams around a clear customer experience and helping designers do their best work. I also embrace AI as a practical creative and technical multiplier. I use it to explore ideas faster, accelerate execution and expand what a focused team can accomplish.
I believe the strongest product experiences happen when user needs, product logic, interaction and visual communication are treated as one design problem.
My career has crossed mobile, PC and console; casual and competitive games; large scale entertainment products and independent development. Across those environments, my focus stays consistent: make the experience understandable, engaging and coherent, and give the team the clarity to deliver it well.
I move comfortably between strategic conversations and detailed creative critique. I care about the quality of the interface, but also the decisions, collaboration and team culture that make that quality repeatable. I see AI as another powerful part of the toolkit: useful for research, synthesis, rapid exploration and prototyping, with human judgment guiding what is relevant, responsible and worth shipping.
A career spanning influential game studios and high volume consumer products, with experience in art direction, product UX/UI and creative team leadership.
Mobile · Art direction · UX/UI DirectionCreative and product design leadership across a broad mobile portfolio. Contributed to products within a company whose games have reached more than 500 million lifetime downloads.
PC strategy · game developmentArt direction and visual development across strategy and interactive entertainment projects, aligning visual language and production execution.
Game production · creative developmentWorked in large scale game development environments where visual direction, craft and collaboration across disciplines were central to the player experience.
Real time strategy · PC gamesContributed to the visual worlds and player facing experiences of influential real time strategy titles.
Interactive entertainmentAdditional projects and collaborations across a broad range of genres and platforms.
Rather than presenting a long gallery of legacy images, this selection focuses on the kinds of challenges I've worked across and the leadership capabilities I bring to each.
Visual direction across real time strategy and interactive entertainment, connecting environments, characters, interface and production teams around a cohesive player experience. Selected credits include Star Wars: Empire at War, Forces of Corruption and other strategy titles.
Information hierarchy, interaction patterns, usability and visual systems that help people understand what to do next. I combine established design methods with AI assisted research, ideation and prototyping to move from question to testable direction more quickly.
Consumer products demand instant clarity, repeatable usability and a consistent experience at scale.
Original editorial illustrations created for this portfolio. They communicate the nature of the work, not historical product screenshots or evidence of specific shipped UI. Project names and trademarks belong to their respective owners. Detailed project claims and outcomes should be discussed in the context of the work Gary personally contributed to.
These are concise overviews of the work and the design challenges. They intentionally distinguish career context from claims that would require project specific metrics or attribution.
Consumer games and utility focused experiences succeed when the interface is immediately understandable, dependable and rewarding to return to. My work at MobilityWare brought together art direction, UX/UI judgment and product experience across a broad portfolio of mobile titles.
Game production requires a coherent player experience across worlds, systems, interfaces and content. My career across studios including Westwood, EA and Petroglyph involved creative collaboration in complex, multidisciplinary production environments.
The Connected Story explores how records, people, family relationships and duplicate resolution might work as one understandable journey. It demonstrates product thinking for Ancestry; it is not commissioned work or a claim about its current product.
Through GC Imagine, I take ideas from concept to shipped product, bringing product strategy, UX/UI, visual design, development and launch together under one roof. These projects span very different audiences, but share the same goal: make useful technology feel clear, thoughtful and enjoyable.
Independently created, end to end. Every app featured here is conceived, designed, built and published by me. I use AI as an assistant to accelerate research, creative exploration and development, while my direction, decisions and practical work remain central.
EXPLORE GC IMAGINE↗
A systems driven space game built around exploration, salvage, combat and consequential choices. A large scale independent project spanning game design, interaction systems, world building and production.
A practical collection of measurement and building tools, designed to make specialized tasks accessible through a straightforward mobile experience.
A focused everyday utility built around speed, clarity and an uninterrupted experience. A reminder that the simplest products still demand thoughtful design.
A content experience focused on constructive stories and a more uplifting view of the world, with a clean interface that keeps the reading experience front and center.
One independent studio. A broad product range. Each project is an opportunity to solve a different customer problem, from complex entertainment experiences to small utilities people rely on every day.
VISIT GCIMAGINE.COM ↗What if family tree, person profiles, historical records and duplicate resolution felt like one continuous journey? This independent design exploration imagines a more connected genealogy experience, balancing emotional discovery with evidence, clarity and user control.
It demonstrates product thinking across a complex ecosystem, not work commissioned or endorsed by Ancestry.
Ancestry's Engage experience brings together meaningful personal information, evidence and relationships. The opportunity is to make that complexity feel coherent without sacrificing accuracy, transparency or the emotional value of discovery.
Bring people, records, trees and next steps into a continuous experience so users understand where they are and what they can do next.
Make evidence, uncertainty, source context and user control visible, especially when a suggested connection or merge could change a family record.
Encourage meaningful progress and return visits through relevance and value, not interruption or engagement for its own sake.
Great creative leadership should leave two things stronger: the product and the people who made it.
I lead by setting clear direction, creating shared understanding and helping talented people do their best work. I value honest feedback, mentorship, cross functional partnership and staying close enough to the craft to recognize when the details matter.
I am comfortable moving between product strategy, creative vision, team development and hands on design critique, connecting the why to the work that ships. I also believe creative leaders should help teams build confidence with emerging AI tools. That means setting thoughtful guardrails while encouraging experimentation that improves quality, speed and creative range.
A career spanning PC, console and mobile games, from art direction on major franchises to original products built independently. Roles are identified by category below.
PC · Art directionStar Wars: Empire at War
PC · Pre Production Art DirectionBattle for Middle Earth
PC · Art directionEmperor: Battle for Dune
Independent · Product design & developmentAdventure Vault
Independent · Product design & developmentAria: Space Frontier
Mobile · Art direction · UX/UI DirectionSolitaire by MobilityWare
Selected projects and additional shipped titles across a career spanning multiple platforms.
I'm interested in product and design leadership opportunities where strong craft, clear strategy and collaborative teams can make a meaningful difference.