I'm Stepheni Mendez — a Denver-based brand and web designer with a background that doesn't fit neatly in a box, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

I've been a agency founder, a corporate design leader, and a startup builder. I know what it means to hustle — and I know what it means to make something beautiful under pressure. These days I channel that into Scrappy Sparrow, where I work directly with small business owners who deserve big-studio thinking without the big-studio budget.

The AI piece is real and it's a game changer. When I vibe-coded Maia — a women's health app launching this summer — entirely out of personal necessity, something clicked. My design thinking background: the ideation, the architecture, the systems work that makes good AI output possible — that's the edge. I now build brands and websites faster, sharper, and more affordably than ever before. And I teach my clients to use these tools too, so they're never dependent on me to keep growing.

I also read tarot and do coaching on the side — which sounds like a plot twist until you realize that deep listening, pattern recognition, and helping people get unstuck are exactly the skills that make a great design partner.

I'm obsessed with cold brew and growing tomatoes, I love the Denver sun, and I genuinely care about the people I build things for.

That's the Cool Auntie spirit. Let's build something worth showing off.