About

Let’s build something meaningful together…

Looking for a product designer to tackle a complex UX problem, refine a mobile app concept, or build a scalable design system? Tell me a bit about your project, and let’s see if we’re a good fit. I typically respond to new inquiries within 48 hours.

Michael Frey is a product designer who specializes in color, typography and interface design, and who builds what he designs, from his own typefaces and color systems to the websites and apps that put them to use.

Michael began as a fine artist in rural New Jersey, where the landscape of the Delaware River shaped the way he first learned to look. Over the years he has moved through drawing, painting, photography, concrete, metalsmithing and 3D-printed jewelry casting before turning to UI/UX design, and he still makes handmade Marine Jewelry in pearl, opal and metal. Moving back and forth between physical materials and digital tools has taught him to solve problems through patient trial and error, and he brings that hands-on way of working to everything he designs for the screen.

Light Underwater

A scuba diver since the age of twelve, Michael has long been fascinated by what happens to color as you descend beneath the surface. Sunlight carries every color of the spectrum, but water doesn't let them all through equally: its molecules absorb the longer, lower-energy wavelengths first, so red fades away within the first five to ten meters, followed gradually by orange, yellow and then green. By around 200 meters, only a faint blue remains, because blue light passes through water more easily than any other color, and below roughly 1,000 meters sunlight never reaches at all.

Color That Disappears

Many deep-sea animals have adapted to this disappearing spectrum in ways that seem counterintuitive at first. An object looks red only because it reflects red light back to the eye, so in water where no red light remains, a red animal has nothing to reflect and appears completely black. This is why so many deep-sea shrimp, jellyfish and fish are red: in an environment without red light, that color becomes a form of invisibility.

Color That Changes

Other animals take the light that does reach them and transform it, a process known as biofluorescence. Specialized molecules in their bodies absorb high-energy blue light and release that energy at a lower-energy, longer wavelength, so the light that returns to the eye is green, orange or red instead of blue. Corals do this with fluorescent proteins, swell sharks do it with a compound in their skin that appears to let them see each other's green glow, and hawksbill sea turtles glow as well. Fluorescence always depends on an outside light source, though: it can change the color of light, but it can't create light on its own.

Color Made from Nothing

In the complete darkness of the deep sea, many animals solve that problem by producing their own light through bioluminescence. A molecule called luciferin reacts with oxygen, with the help of an enzyme called luciferase, and the energy from that reaction is released as visible light. In one survey of deep-sea life, roughly three-quarters of the animals observed could make light this way. Most of it is blue-green, the color that travels farthest through water and the one deep-sea eyes are most sensitive to. Animals use this light to lure prey, attract mates and startle predators, and some even use it to hide: certain squid and fish illuminate their undersides to match the faint glow from above, so their silhouettes disappear when seen from below. A few species of dragonfish go a step further, producing a deep red light that most other animals can't detect, which lets them see without being seen.

Seeing Color

Octopus, squid and cuttlefish can change color in a fraction of a second, using thousands of pigment sacs in their skin, called chromatophores, that are stretched open and squeezed shut by tiny muscles and layered over cells that reflect and scatter light. Remarkably, most of these animals have only one type of light receptor in their eyes, so they're thought to be colorblind, and scientists are still working out how they match their surroundings so precisely.

Humans, by comparison, usually have three types of color receptors, called cones, which respond most strongly to blue, green and red-yellow light, and the brain compares the signals from all three to distinguish perhaps a million different colors. Because the genes for two of those cones sit on the X chromosome, some women inherit a fourth cone variant, but having the extra cone isn't enough on its own, since the brain also has to learn to make use of it: in a 2010 study, only one of 24 carriers tested showed true four-color vision. The mantis shrimp, meanwhile, has between 12 and 16 types of photoreceptor, spanning ultraviolet to red, yet it's actually worse than humans at telling similar colors apart, likely because it recognizes colors instantly rather than comparing them the way our brains do.

It's this gap between what the eye is capable of detecting and what the brain ultimately perceives that sits at the heart of Michael's approach to color.