Kory Garner
KORY GARNER — DESIGN LEADER ✕ APP BUILDER — UTAH

DESIGN.
BUILD.
SHIP.

Thirteen years designing at Ancestry — leading global mobile design teams, then principal-level craft. Alongside: my own shipped apps at DigitalSandbox. Design is still the foundation — it's just no longer where I stop.

CHAPTER 01
The work

Process-heavy case studies from Ancestry — problem, exploration, outcome.

The AncestryPreserve library on web, with the Preserve entry card inside the Memories gallery on iOS.

AncestryPreserve

Your family's tapes come back digital — then what? A private home for a lifetime of memories, shipped across three platforms in three months.

Read the case study →

Record Narratives

What happens when AI can read a century-old census page? Sole designer on Ancestry’s generative-AI features, from first shipped experiment to the big follow-up.

Read the case study →

Media & UGC Suite

Scanning documents, recording voices, transcribing photographs — years of shipping the tools families use to get their history into Ancestry.

Read the case study →
From the archive — earlier Ancestry mobile work →
CHAPTER 02
The apps

Designed, built, and shipped through DigitalSandbox — mine end to end, now with a fully AI-native workflow.

Sideline Score — a final score screen, Huskies 4 to Rapids 2, above a scoring recap list
Sideline Score
One-tap scorekeeping for sports parents
Qubo — hold-to-start solve timer showing a 3×3 personal best
Qubo
A calm, focused timer for speedcubers
Putt Maker — aim and slope arcs overlaid on an illustrated green
Putt Maker
Read greens with your phone’s gyroscope
Search Me! — an Outer Space word search mid-game, six of eight words found
Search Me!
Type any theme, get a word search

These aren't client projects — they're mine. Every tradeoff, every animation curve, every App Store rejection. digitalsandbox.net →

CHAPTER 03
The person
Kory Garner — smiling outdoors in a checked button-down

Utah. Married to my favorite person; dad to four boys and one dog named Churro. I lead design teams with a simple philosophy: give designers space to do their best work. I started my career doing design and code, but lost my coding skills when I switched to native mobile. I'm loving the new agentic coding tools — they've given me back the ability to build whatever idea pops into my head.

I read to escape, watch a lot of football (high school, college, and pro), and am nearly always surrounded by projects in various stages of completion — the good ones become apps.

CHAPTER 04
Say hello
LET'S TALK ↗
LINKEDIN ↗DIGITALSANDBOX ↗