Christopher Smith

Early life and education

Smith was born on September 15, 1983, and grew up in Washington, Indiana, a small town in the southwest of the state, the child of blue-collar parents. His mother worked in retail and in teaching; his father has driven trucks for as long as Smith can remember, including some thirty years on a garbage truck. He has a brother and a sister.^[68] His father's record collection, heavy on classic rock such as Queen) and Electric Light Orchestra, was the first music he absorbed, and Smith credits it with shaping a taste that later widened to take in classical music, the glitch and electronic experiments of the Warp Records catalogue, jazz, and metal of every kind, all of which he says feed into what he makes.^[68]

Through school he was an athlete, playing soccer, volleyball, basketball, baseball and football, until he left high school in his sophomore year. From that point he went, in his words, “all in” on three things at once: playing guitar, working with computers and making art full time.^[68] He had started drawing at a very young age, and the sketchbooks from these years survive: the oldest dated pieces online are from 2003, among them a character sheet for Jhonen Vasquez's comic Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and a study of Freddy Krueger from A Nightmare on Elm Street.^[55] Other work from the same period includes photorealistic graphite portraits, a scratchboard-style leopard, a Vampire Hunter D-inspired cloaked figure, and dense black-and-white surrealist compositions crowded with clocks, planets and hands. Horror cinema, underground comics and gothic animation are the visible influences, and the skulls, bats, tentacles and striped creatures of those teenage pages recur in his adult work.

Music and computers arrived together. Smith has said that for as long as he has done design and programming he has also played guitar and produced music with computers.^[50] His long-standing online handle, guitarsuxxx, dates from these years; atebit came later, adopted for GitHub and LinkedIn and then carried over to Instagram as @atebitart.^[68]

He studied Commercial Art and Design at Vincennes University, the public college twenty miles from his hometown, from 2003 to 2005. His coursework, as he lists it, included illustration, computer-assisted illustration in Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, three levels of graphic design, and interactive media in Macromedia Flash, the tool that would define the first decade of his career.^[2] He was already building for the web before college: his project records list a personal portfolio site, somethingcolorful.com, in 2000 and a project called Paint By Numbers in 2001.^[3] In 2004, at twenty-one, he moved to Los Angeles to join Outflow Technologies, a software consultancy, and pursue what was then called web design. The push came from Ryan Sullivan, a friend from Washington who was already living in Los Angeles and working at Outflow.^[68] His first client sites followed in 2004, including a brand site for the professional gamer Fatal1ty, and within a few years the entry-level designer was building sites for film studios and game publishers seen by millions of people.^[3]

Career

Smith's career divides into four broad phases: agency and freelance interactive development during the Flash era (roughly 2004–2014); teaching and entrepreneurship in Chicago, with DESIGNATION, Adjust Creative and TeamHop (2014–2021); in-house product design at Xplor Technologies (2021–present); and, overlapping the last of these, a run of independent AI-native products and a consulting practice (2024–present).

Flash era: film, game and campaign sites (2004–2014)

After his first year at Outflow, Smith worked with Solid Workshop, a small Los Angeles studio run by Casey Fluster and the late Richard Tsai, on gallery sites for the bridal designer Claire Pettibone and for Earth, Wind & Fire bassist Verdine White (2005–2006).^[3] He has described the studio as one of the most influential places of his career: Fluster, Tsai and their friends and families took in a kid from a small town who felt he was punching above his weight, and made Los Angeles feel like home.^[68] He then joined 65 Media, an entertainment-focused interactive agency, as a front-end developer.^[3] Between 2006 and 2008 he worked on a run of Flash microsites for films and video games that are now preserved in web-design archives: Disney's The Chronicles of Narnia site (a 2006 WebAward winner),^[12] Activision's Call of Duty 3,^[17] Tony Hawk's Downhill Jam and Tony Hawk's Project 8, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, Fox's Eragon) film and game sites, Universal's You, Me and Dupree, the Spider-Man 3) game, Pixar's Ratatouille),^[15] The Simpsons Movie,^[13][14] the Simpsons Ride site for Universal Studios with its promotional game Catapult to Krustyland,^[18] a Snow Buddies dog-sled racing game,^[19] RihannaNow.com, the Sundance Institute's site, and JimCarrey.com, an FWA Site of the Day in which the actor's site was built as a hand-drawn, animated world.^[16]

In 2008 he left Los Angeles for Chicago to join Domani Studios, a Brooklyn-founded creative agency with a Chicago office that was later acquired by BBH,^[25] as a senior interactive developer.^[68] His projects there included the United States launch microsite for the Porsche Panamera (2008),^[21] the Porsche “I Can” campaign sites (2009), both FWA Sites of the Day,^[20] AllstateGarage.com (an FWA Site of the Day and Webby honoree), a Hanesbrands site following a Champion-sponsored Mount Everest expedition,^[26] American Family Insurance campaigns, a Black & Mild campaign and an augmented-reality piece for the U.S. Air Force (2010).^[3] The best known is We Choose the Moon, produced with The Martin Agency for the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum to mark the fortieth anniversary of Apollo 11: a Flash experience that replayed the mission in real time over four days, with archival audio, animation and live mission telemetry. It won a Gold Lion at Cannes in 2010, two D&AD Yellow Pencils and a Wood Pencil, and the Webby Award and People's Voice Award for Education.^[22][23][24]

From 2010 to 2014 Smith worked largely as a freelance and contract developer for Chicago agencies, including DesignKitchen (a Best Buy campaign and a Facebook holiday microsite, 2011), Material Group (McDonald's), Colossal Squid (Sears' ReBuilding America), Iventus Digital (Snow.com and its Being Bobby Brown campaign for Vail Resorts), a front-end consulting engagement at Critical Mass on tablet experiences for USAA (2012),^[56] and a period as an art director at the healthcare agency AbelsonTaylor on Takeda pharmaceutical programs (2011–2012).^[3][57] He also designed and built the first HIMSS Health IT Value Suite with Design Cloud (2012), the website of Chicago Music Magazine (2012), and a set of brand sites for Footman Hospitality's Chicago bars and restaurants (The Anthem, Bangers & Lace, Bucktown Pub, The Betty) in 2013–2014.^[3]

Smith's portfolio summarizes the era's recognition as a Cannes Lions Gold, a D&AD Yellow Pencil, FWA honours and a Webby.^[1] These were awarded to the projects and agencies above; he was a developer and animator on the winning work rather than its credited creative lead, a distinction his later résumés make explicitly.^[3]

Call of Duty 3 (Activision, 2006)

Ratatouille (Disney/Pixar, 2007)

JimCarrey.com (2008–09), FWA Site of the Day

Porsche “I Can” (Domani Studios, 2009)

AllstateGarage.com (2009)

The Simpsons Ride (Universal, 2007–08)

DESIGNATION and teaching (2014–2015)

In 2014 Smith helped a group of Chicago entrepreneurs start DESIGNATION, a twelve-week in-person bootcamp teaching UX, UI and front-end code, which drew students from across the United States and abroad.^[5][50] The school's July 2014 team page lists him as “Front-End Dev Instructor · Creative Director,” and he wrote two pieces for its blog that month: JavaScript Jumpstart and Understanding Code Will Make You A Better Digital Designer.^[2][5] He left in 2015 to concentrate on his own studio. DESIGNATION was acquired by the Flatiron School in August 2018.^[6]

Teaching has remained a constant. He has mentored designers through AIGA Chicago, including the Fall 2021 mentorship program, where he was listed as “Founder / Product Designer & Developer at Adjust Creative” and ran a session on elevating UI design through high-fidelity prototypes;^[4] was a member of the InVision) Design Leadership Forum from 2021 to 2024;^[3] and, at Xplor, taught product managers and engineers how large language models work before any formal mandate existed.^[3]

Adjust Creative (2014–2021)

Smith co-founded Adjust Creative, a Chicago product design and development studio at 415 North LaSalle, with Mike Carpenter, who led product management and information architecture while Smith led creative and technology.^[7][8] The studio described itself as “a design focused interactive agency” and, on its own site, promised to “design engaging experiences that help you grow your business.”^[7][8] Smith owned strategy, business development and the client relationships, and designed and built much of the work himself; by his account the studio grew from nothing to about one million dollars in annual revenue.^[3]

Its projects ranged across data-heavy B2B products and public-interest work: the platform UI and design system for ModelOp, an enterprise AI-governance company; a design system for Engage Mobilize, an oil-and-gas logistics platform; a second edition of the HIMSS Health IT Value Suite; three consecutive annual editions of Clean Jobs Midwest (2016–2018), an interactive report on clean-energy employment;^[27] job-matching platforms for the University of Illinois (NextUpJobs.org and MichiganWorks.com); The Entertainment Institute, an education platform for the Vans Warped Tour; the mobile app for the smart-oven startup Tovala; DePaul University's Digital Divas program; and sites for Midtown Athletic Club and Little Jack Marketing.^[3] Side projects from the studio included Peruse, a design-industry news aggregator (2015–2016), Santa Invaders, a one-day browser game built as a 2017 holiday card,^[34] and an early AI homepage-critique tool trained on IBM Watson, the direct ancestor of DesignCrit.ai.^[30]

The project Smith names as his favourite from the studio years is SEL Journeys (2017), designed and built for Edumotion as a zero-to-one platform. It teaches social and emotional learning to schoolchildren by getting them moving: each lesson is a “journey” to another country, where animated characters demonstrate a dance from that culture (merengue from the Dominican Republic, a corroboree from Australia) step by step while the class follows along, framed by a “big idea,” cultural context for teachers, and reflection prompts afterwards. Smith handled the branding, interface design, character animation and front-end build, and recalls it as highly immersive and fun to design, and as a good idea: a program that educates young children while they exercise in the classroom.^[3][68] SEL Journeys is now distributed by the CATCH Global Foundation as a K–12 program aligned to the CASEL framework for social and emotional learning, with movement activities “inspired by dances from around the world.”^[28]

Smith edited the studio's Medium publication and wrote about its methods, including React Native: Idea to Product in One Week (2016) and a comparison of Shopify, Squarespace and Ruby on Rails for bootstrapped e-commerce (2017); he was quoted on 2017 design trends by Forbes.^[2][35] He began winding the studio down in early 2021, a decision he described in Reflections of a Product Designer, published by UX Collective, in which he explained his wish to return to a senior hands-on individual-contributor role on a larger team.^[9]

TeamHop (2017–2022)

In 2017 Smith co-founded TeamHop with Matt Halpern, the drummer of the progressive-metal band Periphery), as a software-as-a-service product for the travel managers of Major League Baseball clubs, covering team travel schedules, logistics and communication between travel staff, coaches and players.^[3][50][68] He designed and built the whole product: the brand, the user experience, a Ruby on Rails API, a React web application and React Native apps for iOS and Android, published to the app stores under the Adjust Creative name.^[3][11] Starting from a minimum viable product with the Baltimore Orioles, TeamHop grew to serve twelve MLB clubs per season, among them the Braves, Red Sox, Rockies, Angels, Brewers, Phillies and Blue Jays, with Smith selling directly to each club's travel manager; clubs renewed for multiple seasons.^[3] Halpern contributed product input from the touring side. The 2020 pandemic shut down the touring and travel industry the product depended on, growth stalled afterwards, and with both founders occupied elsewhere the company wound down in 2022.^[10][68]

URM Academy and Riffhard (2018–2021)

Through the studio, and later directly, Smith designed and developed the products of URM Academy (Unstoppable Recording Machine), the online school founded by the metal producers Joey Sturgis, Joel Wanasek and Eyal Levi, whose studio credits run from The Devil Wears Prada and Of Mice & Men to Born of Osiris and Asking Alexandria, with the marketer and commentator Finn McKenty as a central part of the team.^[49][50][68] URM has had an outsized influence on how rock and metal records are made: its flagship, Nail The Mix, delivers a new multitrack session from a well-known band every month and streams the producer mixing it from scratch, and the company has since added advanced courses, its own plugins and a guitar school.^[49]

Smith's work there spanned product design and full-stack development in a mix of PHP, React and Ruby on Rails: the URM Academy platform (2018), including the live-mix viewing experience, and the second version of Riffhard, its video-education and community platform for guitarists, which he designed and built in PHP and React with much of the design done directly in code (2019).^[3][68] The work connected his product practice to the metal-production community in which he was already recording and would later design instruments (see Audio software); he remains friends with the URM founders.^[68]

Xplor Technologies (2021–present)

Smith joined Xplor Technologies, a portfolio of vertical software companies, in September 2021 as a senior product designer on TrueCoach, a coaching platform for personal trainers with thousands of daily active users.^[3] He arrived the month after a redesign had shipped without usability testing and the iOS app's rating had fallen to 2.3 stars, with the Android app still in beta. Over the following three years he led a multi-year strategy he summarized as “stabilize, simplify, then unlock growth”: fixing critical bugs, redesigning the mobile experience, folding a failing companion messaging app back into the main product, and shipping a cross-platform design system. The iOS app reached 4.8 stars and Android launched from beta to the same rating.^[1][3]

He then designed the premium features that drove subscription upgrades (habit tracking, wearables integration, a payments redesign, a mobile course builder, public coach profiles, coach-branded client apps and a Zapier integration), and built a repeatable feature-adoption system of announcements, Intercom walkthroughs and in-interface attention cues. In one often-cited example, adding a “new” badge to the wearables feature took adoption from about 15 to about 400 users within hours, a tenth of whom upgraded their subscription tier.^[3] He ran usability tests with roughly 500 coaches per round before overhauling the platform's navigation and information architecture, and documented the work in four public case studies on this site.^[1]

Across Xplor's brands Smith contributed to Apollo, the company's multi-product design system: colour and typography tokens and their documentation, button and form components, a mobile application shell and advanced data tables. He wrote several internal Figma plugins for the design team, including one for managing design variables, and used them to cut one component family from about 1,500 variants to a few hundred.^[3][29]

In 2025 he moved to FieldEdge, Xplor's field-service management product for HVAC and trade contractors. He owns design for its operator workflows (dispatch assignments, customer information architecture and tagging, and a redesign of the proposal software technicians use to sell in the field) and led the zero-to-one design of an online booking portal for homeowners, from discovery through public preview in November 2025 and general release in June 2026.^[3] He designed FieldEdge's mobile and admin design systems and then built a living design-system site generated from the production code rather than from Figma files, with current-versus-future views and readiness levels per component; it has caught specification drift during requirements reviews.^[3]

During Xplor's 2026 push toward AI-assisted development Smith, a senior individual contributor without a formal mandate or direct reports, taught LLM fundamentals to product and engineering staff, and when senior engineers objected that the models returned inaccurate results on their large codebase, built a repository-topology technique spanning roughly ninety repositories that returned targeted impact reports for a given problem.^[3] With a principal engineer he then co-built FieldEdge's AI-assisted product workflow: a library of Claude Code and Cursor skills that takes a product manager from a problem statement to a requirements document, testable acceptance criteria, wireframe rounds and a decision register, ending at a human-signed gate that opens a pull request in engineering's repository. The design principle, in his phrase, is “deterministic gate, agentic worker”: an AI never approves its own work. He wrote the step-by-step prompt tutorial that lets product managers use the system without learning git, presented the architecture and three open decisions to Xplor's Architecture Council, and carries the internal title of AI Business-Unit Trainer alongside his design role.^[3] The design half of that process has since been codified in its own right. ASCII wireframes remain Smith's personal shorthand for early concepts, but the team's standard method now generates fast, disposable design explorations in Excalidraw and turns them into prototypes that are “code-real,” built from the same components and tokens as the shipping software via the design-system site generated from production code. The process is meant for anyone on the product team to use, and for designers to excel with.^[68] As a side effort he published xplor-memory-mcp, a local Model Context Protocol server that gives Cursor and Claude Code typed, persistent, per-project memory.^[3]

Independent products and Applied Clarity (2024–present)

From 2024 Smith has shipped a series of independent products, most of them built solo with AI coding agents and documented publicly as case studies.

• DesignCrit.ai (2024–): a Figma plugin that gives designers instant, persona-based critique of a selected frame, built to fill the “hallway gut check” that remote designers lose. Version 1 was built in about two months in vanilla JavaScript and published within two hours of being judged good enough; version 2 was rebuilt in React 18 and TypeScript with vision-model critique and request throttling.^[30][31][32]
• SumiVibe (2025): a real-time generative-art piece in Three.js and custom GLSL shaders that paints continuous sumi-e ink strokes, with simulated bristles, dry-brush effects and botanical motifs that grow along the stroke; originally conceived as a visual companion for guitar practice.^[53]
• StreetWAVE (2026–): a live-music discovery platform in live beta (Next.js, Supabase and a Python data pipeline). Smith is its only engineer, working with AI agents and a reviewer on a separate model that checks every build; the repository passed 3,100 commits in its first eight months, and he has published a detailed account of how its agentic development process evolved.^[3]
• Magic Maker World (2026, beta): a game-creation platform for children aged eight to twelve that turns a described idea into a playable game with original art and music. Smith publicly corrected its own marketing claim after measurement showed a median generation time of 278 seconds rather than the targeted thirty.^[3]
• Outcome Labs website (February–March 2026): a marketing site for an AI real-estate automation company, built solo in about five weeks with a five-scene GSAP hero cinematic, custom Three.js header visualizations and bespoke button systems.^[58]
• ai-product-design-resources (August 2026): a curated, research-backed collection of agent skills, rules, hooks and MCP servers for design work, with a published cost analysis of the Figma MCP server.^[37]
• Gurgle Chain (2026): a vocal effects plugin for Mac and Windows (AU, VST3 and AAX), written in C++ with the JUCE framework. Its interface is an illustrated face rather than a rack of knobs: six “sorrows” are mapped to a vocal chain (compression, reverb, delay, saturation, pitch and more), and the singer drags the eyes, the ink beneath them, the hair or the lips to shape the sound, with conventional controls behind the face “for the faithless.” It is the first of his own instruments to follow the interface work for RS Drums and HANSEN Audio.^[73]

In 2026 he also founded Applied Clarity, a consulting practice that helps product and engineering teams adopt AI-native ways of working, drawing on the FieldEdge and StreetWAVE processes. Its published offer is a productized six-stage, thirteen-week program moving from deep understanding of how a team builds, through champion alignment and software-development-lifecycle transformation, to change-management education.^[3]

Illustration

Illustration predates everything else in Smith's working life and has never stopped. He lists “Illustrator” among the roles on his site and credits the discipline with his approach to visual storytelling,^[1] but most of the work itself has circulated through social media, band merchandise and album packaging rather than through a formal portfolio. His sketchbooks show a continuous practice: ballpoint fan art and realism exercises in 2003, surreal and political ink compositions in the years after, a 2013 sketchbook page of horror-fantasy figures, controlled pen work in 2017, and new sketches as recently as 2026.^[55]

His mature style is built on dense, confident linework, hatching and stippling in black ink, often finished digitally in a limited screen-print palette of teal, acid green, hot pink and gold. The recurring vocabulary is macabre and playful: skulls and skeletons, bats, tentacles, horned and antlered creatures, rabbit-skull heads, black-and-white Beetlejuice stripes, screaming faces, and electric guitars and basses. Influences visible in the work include Jhonen Vasquez, Tim Burton, Yoshitaka Amano, Wes Craven's Elm Street films, underground and punk comics, Hokusai's waves and Alphonse Mucha's art-nouveau framing.^[55]

Much of his commercial illustration has been for bands in Chicago's heavy-music scene: gig posters, shirt designs and album art, including a series of pieces for the progressive-metal band Oceanborn around 2013–2014 (a sea serpent emerging from a Hokusai-style wave; a three-skulled, bat-winged, tentacled figure) and the artwork for the band's 2012 EP The Descent.^[55][70] Since founding BLVM3 Studios he has designed the cover art for most of the records he has produced or played on, including the BLVM3 singles and Sessions EPs, the Comasoft EPs Finis Temporis and Gather at the End, the New Demons and Tre Zilla singles and The Revel Abstract's Incomplet; for Crown (2026) he drew the Sleep of Mirrors logo and laid out the packaging around Steve Gomez's cover image.^[38][66][68] Horror fan art has been a constant subject; a neon-palette Nightmare on Elm Street poster from 2017 answers the ballpoint Freddy Krueger study he drew fourteen years earlier.

Smith publishes drawings on Instagram as @atebitart, where the posts are watermarked with his long-standing music handle guitarsuxxx, and through Dead Punk Art, a Facebook page describing him as an “artist for hire.”^[54] The same page carries a portfolio collage signed “Christopher Lee,” the name he uses for creative credits. He has also used illustration inside his design work, from the hand-drawn world of JimCarrey.com and the characters of SEL Journeys to the Oceanborn web comic of 2013, a sequential-art story with an embedded music player, and, most recently, as the visual foundation for SumiVibe's generative ink. For Sleep of Mirrors he drew the band's logo and laid out the Crown packaging.^[66]

Freddy Krueger study, ballpoint, 2003

Leopard, pen and ink, 2003

Untitled surrealist composition, ink

Warrior with horn, signed pen drawing

Punk bassist, pen and ink

Owl with antlers and stripes, pen on notebook paper

Sketchbook page, 2013

Band merchandise designs, including Oceanborn (centre)

Elm Street poster, digital, 2017

The Revel Abstract, Incomplet (2019)

BLVM3, Suffer in Silence (2022)

BLVM3, Sessions, Vol. 1 (2023)

BLVM3, Sessions, Vol. 2 (2023)

BLVM3, Symphony of Death (2023)

Comasoft, Finis Temporis (2023)

BLVM3, No Remorse (2024)

Comasoft, Gather at the End (2025)

New Demons, Singularity (2025)

New Demons, Take My Hand (2025)

Tre Zilla, All Out of Love (2025)

Tre Zilla, Frienemy (2024)

Animation and video production

Animation was the second discipline Smith learned, through Macromedia Flash at Vincennes, and it was the skill that carried him into professional interactive work.^[2] Flash microsites of the mid-2000s were as much short films as websites, and his project records credit him with animation as well as programming on most of the film and game sites of the 65 Media and Domani years, including The Simpsons Movie, Ratatouille, Tony Hawk's Downhill Jam, The Simpsons Ride, JimCarrey.com, the Porsche “I Can” sites and AllstateGarage.com.^[1][3] The two browser games from that period, Catapult to Krustyland and the Snow Buddies dog-sled race, were animated and coded in Flash.^[18][19] One artifact of that lineage survives on this site: the animated vine that grows across its home page descends from an ActionScript vine simulation he kept from the Flash era and later ported to the web canvas.

Video came through music. Smith keeps a public YouTube playlist, Christopher's Production Credits, of forty-three videos on which he “performed, written, engineered or produced music or video.”^[62] The earliest entries date from his Oceanborn years: a 2013 walkthrough of the band's web comic, the song Lead Astray, and in 2014 the official video and teaser for These Darker Things.^[62] From the same period the playlist includes videos for the Chicago bands Hessler and KidsonFire, a 2016 anniversary spot for Adjust Creative, and later clips for Releaser, The Revel Abstract and Jay Draws Things.

Since founding BLVM3 Studios the video work has run alongside the records. Smith has produced or post-produced official videos for New Demons (Comatose and Secrets and Lies, 2023; We Are Legion, 2024), Tre Zilla (Twist of Fate, Goodfella), Santo Gato (Midnight Ride), BLVM3 (Symphony of Death, No Remorse) and Ricky Liontones (Illusion of Choice, featuring Alain Johannes, 2025).^[62] For Sleep of Mirrors in 2026 he made the band's two official videos. Gemini, premiered by ReGen Magazine on 29 April 2026 ahead of the album's release on Negative Gain Productions, had passed thirty thousand views within six months.^[62][64][77] Not My Skin, premiered by Post-Punk.com on 25 June 2026 with an interview with the band, was “directed and produced by Christopher Lee” in the magazine's words; it was conceived with bandmate Danny Lucero from Jay Ramirez's lyric about where the border of a person ends; Smith produced its storyline of a synthetic body being built and waking, using generative image and video tools, then edited and finished the piece, with band footage shot at Bourbon on Division in Chicago by Cornelius Kite and Tom Birch.^[63][66][74] An earlier concept, in which guest vocalist Ronnie Canizaro would have been the robot, was abandoned when, as Smith put it, the AI “kept giving him boobs.”^[66] He also builds the video-wall visuals the band performs in front of, and cut a sixteen-minute three-camera documentary, The Making of Crown, in May 2026.^[62][65]

In 2026 he also began a series of short talking-head videos on his own process (titled, among others, Review, Transitioning, Recording and Claude), documenting AI-assisted development and recording side by side.^[55]

Music and audio

Smith's main instrument is the guitar; he also plays bass and piano and has dabbled in many others, and he has recorded and produced music with computers for as long as he has designed for them.^[68] His studio, BLVM3 Studios (earlier Blume Recording Studio) in Chicago, describes itself as “a songwriting, recording & publishing studio,” and BLVM3 is also the alias under which he releases his own material.^[43] A circle of collaborators recurs across its output: the vocalists Jay Ramirez and Ronnie Canizaro, the producer Santo Gato and the vocalist Ricky Liontones appear on BLVM3, Comasoft and Sleep of Mirrors records alike.^[38][40] His production catalogue, collected in the Spotify playlist Christopher Lee's Production (108 songs across some thirty releases on which he has worked “as a musician, writer, producer or engineer”) and a companion YouTube playlist, runs from trip hop, R&B, pop and jazz to darkwave, progressive and extreme metal; his music Linktree, under the handle guitarsuxxx, describes him simply as “Musician / Designer / Tech.”^{[44][50][61][62][69]}

Bands and BLVM3 Studios

Smith has played in a number of Chicago bands over the years. In the early 2010s he was a member of the progressive-metal band Oceanborn, which began as Tattoo the Devil and released the three-song EP The Descent under that name in March 2012 before its debut album, Hidden from the World, in September 2013; Smith also drew the band's posters, merchandise and artwork.^[55][69][70] A February 2014 post shows him recruiting a drummer for a new progressive rock and metal project, and the video for the album track These Darker Things followed that May.^[55] Smith co-founded the band and played guitar on the album, which the group wrote and produced itself before handing it to Eyal Levi to mix and Alan Douches to master; Danger Dog's review gave it four and a half stars out of five and singled out his lead playing, the web comic and the CD packaging.^[79][80][82] In the same years he produced Hëssler's Ghost Dance EP (2014) with Igz Kincaid, also engineering and mastering it,^[78] and worked on The Last Vegas's Eat Me (2016).^[69][71] He is a member of Comasoft, the long-running Chicago electro-rock band of Jay Ramirez and Tomasz Banach, whose 2008 lineup already listed a “Chris” on bass and keys; the band's 2025 EP Gather at the End, on the Moth in a Flame label, was produced at BLVM3 Studios, and the press release names Christopher Lee among its four members.^[40][41]

Under the BLVM3 name he released the single Suffer in Silence (featuring Canizaro, Ramirez, Liontones and himself) in October 2022, the six-track EPs Sessions, Vol. 1 (April 2023) and Sessions, Vol. 2 (August 2023), on which he is credited as composer of every track, and the singles Symphony of Death (October 2023) and No Remorse (2024), both with Canizaro.^[42][43] He has produced the Chicago metalcore band New Demons since their first single, That's What I Want (2022), through Comatose and Secrets and Lies (2023), We Are Legion (2024) and the co-written Singularity and Take My Hand (2025);^[45] produced the rapper Tre Zilla's Pathways EP (2022) and later singles; engineered the pop EP Ashes (2025) by Amanda Giles;^[46] and produced and co-wrote Incomplet (2019) by The Revel Abstract.^[1] Other credits in his production playlist include Releaser's singles (2020–2022), the Pariahs EP (2024) by Contrition, a Chicago metal band formed by members of Trouble, Chrome Waves and Yakuza, which he recorded with the band and which MetalSucks premiered,^[81] a remix of Aerosol's Breathe released as Chris Lee (2024), and, in 2026, the album Selfish Love by Bobby D and the Big Frames, Miss Misery's King of Nothing and two singles by Ricky Liontones.^[69][72]

His most complete credit is Sleep of Mirrors, the Chicago dark-electronic trio he formed with Jay Ramirez and Danny Lucero (who records as Santo Gato), blending darkwave, electro and dark techno under one guiding principle: “the only rule is that the music feels real.”^[38][66] Its debut album Crown was released on 8 May 2026 by Negative Gain Productions, recorded at BLVM3 Studios and mastered by Dan Zorn, after Side-Line premiered the full album and ReGen Magazine premiered the Gemini video;^[76][77] Chain D.L.K. and ReGen both covered the release, the latter describing it as “produced by the band trio of Christopher Lee, Jay Ramirez, and Danny Lucero”;^[75][77] all ten songs were written and recorded by Smith, Ramirez and Lucero, with Ronnie Canizaro of Born of Osiris, a regular at the band's “music Thursdays,” singing on Not My Skin and adding vocals and production to four other tracks.^[38][66] Smith, as Christopher Lee, is credited with vocals, guitars, bass guitars, synthesizers, programming, mixing and production, drew the band's logo, laid out the album art around Steve Gomez's (Pinkmachine) cover image, and made both of its videos (see Animation and video).^[38][66]

The band took Crown to the stage in the autumn of 2026, headlining a Forever Deaf Presents bill at Liar's Club in Chicago on 17 October with The Secrecy, Lilac Lament and Faithless Devotion.^[67] Smith built the live rig himself: an Ableton Live set assembled from the album's master stems, with a MIDI cue map that fires twenty-four DMX lighting changes across the eight-song set, vocal and guitar effect chains, and video-wall visuals cut from the videos, developed through a documented iteration log with Claude Code as the analysis and generation tool.^[66]

Selected discography

“Production credit” marks releases that appear in Smith's production playlist without a more specific role on record. Recent releases, with streaming links and artwork, are also listed in the Music Production section of this site.

Selected videography

Videos from the Christopher's Production Credits playlist, on which Smith has a music or video credit. Years are approximate where taken from upload dates.^[62]

Audio software

Smith's position between software design and metal production led him into instrument design. He helped the drummers Anup Sastry and Alex Rüdinger put together RS Drums, a company selling sampled metal drum libraries for Native Instruments' Kontakt, and has designed the user interfaces of its instruments: ENSO (2021), The Fairview Kit (2024), The Monarch Kit (2025) and Progressive Prodigy, a signature library recorded with the drummer Simen Sandnes (2025).^[1][47][50] For HANSEN Audio, the store of the Danish producer Jacob Hansen, he designed The JANZI Kit (2025), a Kontakt Player library performed by Adam Janzi of the band VOLA).^[48] In late 2026 he began building his own plugin, Gurgle Chain, a vocal effects chain in C++ and JUCE whose controls are the features of an illustrated face (see Independent products).^[2][73]

Writing and community

Smith writes occasionally on Medium as @movepixels, where his profile describes “a multidisciplinary product designer and leader with a strong foundation of computer programming” researching the intersection of design, music and artificial intelligence.^[29] His most-read pieces are Reflections of a Product Designer (UX Collective, June 2021), on winding down his studio and the value of designers who can program;^[9] the October 2024 case study Zero-to-One AI Product for Designers, on building DesignCrit.ai;^[30] a 2024 Recap covering TrueCoach releases, design-system work and music;^[29] and AI Impact on Tech “Unicorns” (November 2025), which argues that AI rewards judgment, taste and clear briefs, and that collaboration and mentorship matter more as the tools do more of the work.^[33] Earlier posts are hands-on tutorials: a JavaScript ES6 idiom generator (2018), importing large CSV files into RDS from a Heroku Rails app (2019), and the Santa Invaders mini-game walkthrough.^[34]

On GitHub (atebit, since January 2014) most of his repositories are private for work, but public ones include the Peruse news aggregator, the AviateRTC moderated-video experiment (2016), a couple of AI-model test repositories, and the ai-product-design-resources collection.^[36][37] He has mentored through AIGA Chicago since 2021 and was a member of the InVision Design Leadership Forum from 2021 to 2024.^[3][4]

Approach and working methods

Several principles recur across Smith's writing and case studies. He judges design by adoption and business results rather than by the artifact: “adoption is the product.”^[3] He prefers to work in code wherever it is faster than a design file, from the Riffhard platform designed directly in PHP and React to the FieldEdge design-system site generated from production code, and he argues that “six ASCII concepts cost minutes; six Figma concepts cost a design sprint,” a preference for cheap, disposable exploration that his team's Excalidraw-to-code-real prototyping process now formalizes.^[3][68] In AI-assisted work he insists on human sign-off at deterministic gates, with one named signer per artifact, and on measurement over marketing, publishing a product's real latency when it missed its target.^[3]

He resists the question of what his “thing” is as a musician or an artist. Asked for a specialty, he tends to answer that he does not have one in the usual sense: what interests him is the pattern that repeats across disciplines, and the creative loop itself, from a sketch or a riff to a shipped product, is the part of the work he values most. It is the reason the same person appears in this article as an illustrator, an animator, a developer, a designer and a producer, and why the site calls it “a polymath approach to creative work.”^[1][68]

I've been every person an idea has to get past: the designer who shapes it, the engineer who builds it, the marketer who makes people want it, the founder who has to sell it, the teacher who makes it stick.

He describes the agency years as the source of his comfort with marketing and brand (“the marketing years are why I can bring a brand into a product and change how an audience feels about it”), and credits the long sketchbook habit with the visual fundamentals he teaches: type, hierarchy, colour and scale.^[3] On generative work he has written that “procedural content needs self-regulation,” after building homeostatic systems into SumiVibe so that its ink neither spirals into chaos nor settles into boredom.^[53]

Personal life

Smith lives in Chicago, where he has been based since moving from Los Angeles in 2008.^[68] He has a daughter, born in 2017, whom he describes as an inspiration, and whose arrival coincided with the founding of TeamHop and the most prolific stretch of his studio years. His public feeds, which run back to about 2009, show the interests that feed the work: seven- and eight-string guitars and home-studio gear, horror films and Halloween, Star Wars and Batman collectibles, Studio Ghibli, Chicago's music venues and festivals, cats, cooking, bonsai, and a trip to Japan in the mid-2010s.^[55]

He uses several names and handles. In music and illustration credits he is usually Christopher Lee, his first and middle names; online his oldest handle is guitarsuxxx (Linktree, TikTok, Facebook and his art watermark); atebit, adopted for GitHub and LinkedIn, followed it to Instagram as @atebitart; and he writes on Medium as movepixels and releases music as BLVM3.^{[2][36][43][54][61][68]}

Selected works

1. 2000–2001
   somethingcolorful.com portfolio; Paint By Numbers.
2. 2004
   Fatal1ty.com and PacTrim.com (Outflow Technologies).
3. 2005–2006
   Claire Pettibone and Verdine White sites (Solid Workshop).
4. 2006
   The Chronicles of Narnia, Call of Duty 3, Tony Hawk's Downhill Jam, Tony Hawk's Project 8, Eragon, You, Me and Dupree (65 Media).
5. 2007
   The Simpsons Movie, The Simpsons Ride, Ratatouille, Spider-Man 3: The Game, Snow Buddies, RihannaNow.com, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars (65 Media).
6. 2008
   JimCarrey.com, Sundance.org, Breach, Ann & George Lopez Foundation (65 Media); Porsche Panamera launch site (Domani Studios).
7. 2009
   We Choose the Moon, Porsche “I Can” and “I Can” v2, AllstateGarage.com, Hanesbrands ClimbWithUs.com (Domani Studios).
8. 2010
   U.S. Air Force augmented reality (Domani); McDonald's, Sears ReBuilding America, Snow.com.
9. 2011–2012
   Best Buy and Facebook Holidays (DesignKitchen); Takeda programs (AbelsonTaylor); USAA tablet experiences (Critical Mass); HIMSS Health IT Value Suite; Chicago Music Magazine.
10. 2012–2014
    Oceanborn: The Descent EP, Hidden from the World, the web comic, posters and the These Darker Things video; Hëssler Ghost Dance; Footman Hospitality sites.
11. 2014
    DESIGNATION instructor; Adjust Creative founded; Tovala app.
12. 2015–2018
    HIMSS Value Suite v2; Clean Jobs Midwest 2016–2018; NextUpJobs and MichiganWorks; The Entertainment Institute; SEL Journeys; Engage Mobilize; URM Academy platform.
13. 2017
    TeamHop launches with the Baltimore Orioles.
14. 2019
    Riffhard v2; Incomplet (The Revel Abstract).
15. 2021
    Joins Xplor; TrueCoach mobile redesign; Apollo Design System; ENSO (RS Drums); ModelOp platform UI.
16. 2022–2024
    TrueCoach growth features and navigation overhaul; BLVM3 releases; Finis Temporis; Fairview Kit; DesignCrit.ai (October 2024).
17. 2025
    FieldEdge design systems and Online Booking Portal (preview); SumiVibe; Monarch, Progressive Prodigy and JANZI kits; Gather at the End; New Demons singles.
18. 2026
    FieldEdge AI product workflow and Architecture Council; Online Booking general release; StreetWAVE beta; Outcome Labs site; Crown (Sleep of Mirrors) with the Gemini and Not My Skin videos and a Liar's Club headline show; Applied Clarity; ai-product-design-resources; Gurgle Chain.

A filterable list of more than a hundred projects, with archive links, is in the History section of this site.

See also

• TrueCoach Mobile Products Overhaul — case study
• TrueCoach Growth Features — case study
• TrueCoach Design Systems — case study
• TrueCoach Feature Adoption — case study
• DesignCrit.ai — case study
• SumiVibe — case study
• Work history — all projects, 2000–present
• Music production — releases and streaming links

References

1. ^ 1.Christopher Smith, christophersmith.io (portfolio: About, Case Studies, Music Production and Audio Software sections). christophersmith.io. Retrieved 7 November 2026.
2. ^ 2.Christopher Smith, LinkedIn profile (education, publications, recent activity). www.linkedin.com/in/atebit. Retrieved 7 November 2026.
3. ^ 3.Christopher Smith, résumé (October 2026) and self-reported work history and project records, 2000–2026. Figures for TeamHop, Adjust Creative, TrueCoach, FieldEdge, StreetWAVE and Magic Maker World are as stated by Smith.
4. ^ 4.“Christopher Smith,” 2021 Fall Mentors, AIGA Chicago. chicago.aiga.org/mentorship/2021-fall-mentors/christopher-smith. Retrieved 6 October 2026.
5. ^ 5.DESIGNATION, “About” page, archived 29 July 2014 (team listing: “Christopher Smith · Front-End Dev Instructor · Creative Director”). web.archive.org/web/20140729013151/http://designation.io/about. Retrieved 6 October 2026.
6. ^ 6.“DESIGNATION,” Course Report (“As of May 2019, Designation is now Flatiron School”). www.coursereport.com/schools/designation. Retrieved 6 October 2026.
7. ^ 7.Adjust Creative, home and team pages, archived 10 August 2020. web.archive.org/web/20200810164124/https://adjustcreative.com. Retrieved 6 October 2026.
8. ^ 8.“Adjust Creative,” Built In Chicago. builtin.com/company/adjust-creative. Retrieved 7 November 2026.
9. ^ 9.Christopher Smith, “Reflections of a product designer,” UX Collective, 30 June 2021. uxdesign.cc/reflections-of-a-product-designer-43fbc3202679
10. ^ 10.TeamHop, privacy policy page (“Tour Management Tools for Sports Teams”), archived 30 August 2019. web.archive.org/web/20190830103500/https://www.teamhopapp.com/legal/privacy. Retrieved 6 October 2026.
11. ^ 11.“TeamHop by Adjust Creative,” App Store listing (App ID 1217089101), mirrored at AppAdvice. appadvice.com/app/teamhop/1217089101. Retrieved 6 October 2026.
12. ^ 12.“Outstanding Website: The Chronicles of Narnia,” WebAward 2006, Web Marketing Association (Buena Vista Pictures Marketing with 65 Media). www.webaward.org/winner.asp?eid=5351. Retrieved 6 October 2026.
13. ^ 13.“65 Media / Twentieth Century Fox: The Simpsons Movie,” MediaPost (2008 awards finalist listing). www.mediapost.com/publications/article/89426/65-media-twentieth-century-foxthe-simpsons-movi.html. Retrieved 7 November 2026.
14. ^ 14.“The Simpsons Movie in 2007,” Web Design Museum. www.webdesignmuseum.org/gallery/the-simpsons-movie-in-2007
15. ^ 15.“Ratatouille in 2007,” Web Design Museum. www.webdesignmuseum.org/gallery/ratatouille-in-2007
16. ^ 16.“Jim Carrey in 2009,” Web Design Museum. www.webdesignmuseum.org/gallery/jim-carrey-in-2009
17. ^ 17.“Call of Duty 3 in 2006,” Flash websites in the mid-00s, Web Design Museum. www.webdesignmuseum.org/flash-websites-in-the-mid-00s/call-of-duty-3-in-2006
18. ^ 18.“Catapult to Krustyland (lost promotional online game for Universal Studios motion simulator ride; 2008),” Lost Media Wiki. lostmediawiki.com/Catapult_to_Krustyland_(lost_promotional_online_game_for_Universal_Studios_motion_simulator_ride;_2008)
19. ^ 19.“Snow Buddies: Dog Sled Race,” Flash Museum. flashmuseum.org/snow-buddies-dog-sled-race
20. ^ 20.Domani Studios, “Porsche: I Can,” Behance, 19 January 2009. www.behance.net/gallery/171572/Porsche-I-Can
21. ^ 21.Porsche Panamera microsite (USA), archived 16 June 2009. web.archive.org/web/20090616192147/http://panamera.porsche.com/microsite/panamera/usa.aspx
22. ^ 22.“We Choose the Moon,” Cannes Lions 2010, Gold, Websites & Microsites (The Martin Agency for the JFK Presidential Library and Museum), Love the Work. lovethework.com/work-awards/entries/we-choose-the-moon-278137. Retrieved 7 November 2026.
23. ^ 23.“We Choose the Moon,” D&AD Awards Archive 2010 (Digital Experience Design: two Yellow Pencils and a Wood Pencil). www.dandad.org/work/d-ad-awards-archive/we-choose-the-moon. Retrieved 7 November 2026.
24. ^ 24.“We Choose the Moon,” MIT Open Documentary Lab, Docubase (credits The Martin Agency and Domani Studios; Webby Awards Education winner and People's Voice). docubase.mit.edu/project/we-choose-the-moon
25. ^ 25.“BBH acquires Brooklyn-based Domani,” The Drum, 16 June 2015. www.thedrum.com/news/2015/06/16/bbh-acquires-brooklyn-based-domani
26. ^ 26.“Hanesbrands Inc. and its Champion and Duofold apparel brands launch Mount Everest expedition,” Climbing, 2009. www.climbing.com/news/hanesbrands-inc-and-its-champion-and-duofold-apparel-brands-launch-mount-everest-expedition-to-test-innovative-apparel-and-inspire-others-to-achieve-their-own-everest
27. ^ 27.“Clean Jobs Midwest 2018,” E2 (Environmental Entrepreneurs). e2.org/reports/clean-jobs-midwest-2018
28. ^ 28.“Social and Emotional Learning with SEL Journeys,” CATCH Global Foundation (“The K-12 program uses movement and cultural learning to teach and reinforce SEL concepts via a highly engaging digital platform”). catch.org/sel. Retrieved 7 November 2026.
29. ^ 29.Christopher Smith, “2024 Recap,” Medium (@movepixels), 3 January 2025. movepixels.medium.com/2024-recap-6376859e7926
30. ^ 30.Christopher Smith, “Case Study: Zero-to-One AI Product for Designers,” Medium (@movepixels), 12 October 2024. movepixels.medium.com/case-study-zero-to-one-ai-product-for-designers-c94a9ad902ff
31. ^ 31.DesignCrit.ai (“Your personal design feedback tool”). designcrit.ai. Retrieved 7 November 2026.
32. ^ 32.“DesignCrit.ai,” Figma Community plugin listing. www.figma.com/community/plugin/1415053708566903149/designcrit-ai
33. ^ 33.Christopher Smith, “AI Impact on Tech ‘Unicorns’,” Medium (@movepixels), 8 November 2025. movepixels.medium.com/ai-impact-on-tech-unicorns-b287131776da
34. ^ 34.Christopher Smith, “Javascript Mini-game Tutorial: Santa's Holiday Stranger Star Invaders,” Medium (@movepixels), written 2017, republished 8 November 2025. movepixels.medium.com/javascript-mini-game-tutorial-santas-holiday-stranger-star-invaders-c99484e6ce21
35. ^ 35.Christopher Smith, “Shopify vs Squarespace vs Ruby on Rails for bootstrapped ecommerce for non-devs,” Ecommerce Magazine (Medium), 10 May 2017. medium.com/ecommerce-magazine/shopify-vs-squarespace-vs-ruby-on-rails-for-bootstrapped-ecommerce-for-non-devs-f5da6dbbcc95
36. ^ 36.atebit (Christopher Smith), GitHub profile and public repositories. github.com/atebit. Retrieved 7 November 2026.
37. ^ 37.Christopher Smith, ai-product-design-resources, GitHub, August–September 2026. github.com/atebit/ai-product-design-resources
38. ^ 38.Sleep of Mirrors, Crown, Bandcamp (release date, label, tracklist and credits). sleepofmirrors.bandcamp.com/album/crown. Retrieved 7 November 2026.
39. ^ 40.“Chicago's Comasoft make triumphant return with new EP Gather at the End on April 25th,” Chain D.L.K., 2 May 2025. chaindlk.com/news/bands/chicagos-comasoft-make-triumphant-return-with-new-ep-gather-at-the-end-on-april-25th
40. ^ 41.“Comasoft,” Last.fm artist wiki (lineup as of November 2008). www.last.fm/music/Comasoft/+wiki
41. ^ 42.BLVM3, Symphony of Death and Sessions EPs, Deezer (composer and writer credits: Christopher Lee Smith). www.deezer.com/en/album/501655661
42. ^ 43.BLVM3, Linktree (“BLVM3 is a songwriting, recording & publishing studio”). linktr.ee/blvm3. Retrieved 7 November 2026.
43. ^ 44.“Christopher Lee's Production,” Spotify playlist. open.spotify.com/playlist/6jLRRcy7IdfjuFTltWsqbz
44. ^ 45.“Secrets and Lies: New Demons,” The Metalverse, 1 July 2023. themetalverse.net/secrets-and-lies-new-demons
45. ^ 46.Amanda Giles, Ashes (EP), Apple Music, 3 October 2025. music.apple.com/us/album/1840102685
46. ^ 47.RS Drums, product pages (The Monarch Kit, The Fairview Kit, Progressive Prodigy). rsdrums.com. Retrieved 7 November 2026.
47. ^ 48.“The JANZI Kit: Kontakt Player drum library,” HANSEN Audio. hansenaudio.shop/products/the-janzi-kit-kontakt-player-drum-library
48. ^ 49.URM Academy (Unstoppable Recording Machine): “The world's best education for metal musicians”; Nail The Mix (“a new session every month from a world-class band, and access to the livestream where the producer mixes the song from scratch”). urm.academy. Retrieved 7 November 2026.
49. ^ 50.Christopher Smith, christophersmith.io, archived 23 January 2021 (“Hi, I'm a professional creative sponge…”) and the 2024 portfolio text on DESIGNATION, music and RS Drums. web.archive.org/web/20210123095833/http://christophersmith.io
50. ^ 53.Christopher Smith, “SumiVibe: Art + Music in Time,” case study, christophersmith.io; live at sumivibe.com. sumivibe.com
51. ^ 54.Christopher Smith, Instagram (@atebitart) and the Facebook page Dead Punk Art (“Artist for hire”; 382 followers as of November 2026). www.instagram.com/atebitart
52. ^ 55.Smith's public Facebook and Instagram photo archives (c. 2009–2026) and dated sketchbook pages, reviewed November 2026. Years are those written on the drawings or shown in the posts.
53. ^ 56.“Omnicom buys out remaining stock in digital marketing firm Critical Mass,” The Drum, 14 November 2014. www.thedrum.com/news/2014/11/14/omnicom-buys-out-remaining-stock-digital-marketing-firm-critical-mass
54. ^ 57.“AbelsonTaylor,” PharmaLive agency profile, 2019. www.pharmalive.com/abelsontaylor-2019
55. ^ 58.Christopher Smith, “Outcome Labs Website V2,” case study, March 2026 (unpublished).
56. ^ 61.Christopher Lee (guitarsuxxx), Linktree (“Musician / Designer / Tech”; links to Sleep of Mirrors, BLVM3, New Demons, Oceanborn, Comasoft, Tre Zilla, RS Drums and social accounts). linktr.ee/guitarsuxxx. Retrieved 7 November 2026.
57. ^ 62.“Christopher's Production Credits,” YouTube playlist by Christopher Lee, 43 videos (“A collection of videos that I've either performed, written, engineered or produced music or video”). www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJEKQ1nWBzCDOmr9sPECkXJkGsbfVm9r6. Retrieved 7 November 2026.
58. ^ 63.Sleep Of Mirrors, “Not My Skin (feat. Ronnie Canizaro),” official video, YouTube, premiered 25 June 2026 (video credits: Cornelius Kite and Tom Birch, cinematography; Christopher Lee, video wall visuals, editing and post effects). www.youtube.com/watch?v=foATn4nBk8k
59. ^ 64.Sleep of Mirrors, “Gemini (Official Video),” YouTube, Negative Gain Productions, 2026. www.youtube.com/@negativegainproductions
60. ^ 65.Sleep Of Mirrors, “The Making of Crown,” YouTube, 2026 (16 min).
61. ^ 66.Sleep of Mirrors production records, 2026: album credits and song splits, Not My Skin video credits and press interview (“Sleep Of Mirrors Premiere ‘Not My Skin’ Video Featuring Ronnie Canizaro of Born of Osiris”), and the SoM Live 2026 Ableton build log. Unpublished; in Smith's files.
62. ^ 67.“Forever Deaf Presents: Sleep of Mirrors, The Secrecy, Lilac Lament, Faithless Devotion,” show poster, Liar's Club, Chicago, 17 October 2026; live footage from the show (November 2026).
63. ^ 68.Christopher Smith, personal communication, 7 November 2026 (date of birth, family background, childhood in Washington, Indiana, Solid Workshop, SEL Journeys, TeamHop, URM Academy, the FieldEdge design process, sports, leaving high school, musical tastes, instruments, the moves to Los Angeles and Chicago, online handles, album cover art).
64. ^ 69.“Christopher Lee's Production,” Spotify playlist, 108 songs (screenshots supplied by Smith, 7 November 2026; transcription in the site's research notes).
65. ^ 70.“Chicago-based progressive metal band Oceanborn…,” Prog Rock Metal blog, August 2013 (debut album Hidden from the World, 24 September 2013); Oceanborn discography at metal.it (The Descent EP, March 2012, as Tattoo the Devil). www.metal.it/group.aspx/15002/oceanborn
66. ^ 71.Reggies Chicago, Hëssler Ghost Dance EP release (10 June 2014); Metal Odyssey, “The Last Vegas: Eat Me releasing on March 18th, 2016.” metalodyssey.net/2016/02/07/the-last-vegas-eat-me-releasing-on-march-18th-2016
67. ^ 72.“Chicago rock band Releaser reflects on ‘Vicious Cycles’ single…,” Daily Herald, 7 July 2022; “Contrition: MetalSucks streams Pariahs EP…,” Infrared Magazine, October 2024. www.dailyherald.com/20220707/entertainment/chicago-rock-band-releaser-reflects-on-vicious-cycles-single-ahead-of-friday-show-with-filter
68. ^ 73.Gurgle Chain (“vocals that ache”), product site and project files, October–November 2026: AU, VST3 and AAX for Mac and Windows; six “sorrows” (compression, reverb, delay, saturation, pitch) controlled through an illustrated face. gurglechain.com
69. ^ 74.Alice Teeple, “Chicago Dark Electronic Act Sleep of Mirrors Animate the Body in Video for ‘Not My Skin’,” Post-Punk.com, 25 June 2026 (“Directed and produced by Christopher Lee”; credits “Christopher Lee's video wall visuals, editing, and post effects”; interview). post-punk.com/?p=92253
70. ^ 75.Marc Urselli, “Chicago's darkwave / dark techno / industrial unit Sleep of Mirrors released debut album Crown via Negative Gain Productions,” Chain D.L.K., 8 May 2026 (credits Christopher Lee with vocals, synths, programming, mixing, production, album-art layout and logo). chaindlk.com/news/releases/chicagos-darkwave-dark-techno-industrial-unit-sleep-of-mirrors-released-debut-album-crown-via-negative-gain-productions
71. ^ 76.“Sleep of Mirrors: Crown (debut album premiere),” Side-Line Magazine, 7 May 2026. www.side-line.com/sleep-of-mirrors-crown-debut-album
72. ^ 77.Ilker Yücel, “Negative Gain Productions releases latest album from Sleep of Mirrors…,” ReGen Magazine, 8 May 2026 (“produced by the band trio of Christopher Lee, Jay Ramirez, and Danny Lucero”; notes ReGen's 29 April premiere of the Gemini video). regenmag.com/news/news-negative-gain-productions-releases-latest-album-from-sleep-of-mirrors-announces-new-ep-from-choke-chain-and-upcoming-album-by-bestial-mouths
73. ^ 78.John Kindred, “Hessler: Ghost Dance EP review,” Hard Rock Haven, 4 November 2014 (“Christopher Lee and Igz Kincaid produced the EP”; Lee also engineered and mastered). hardrockhaven.net/online/2014/hessler-ghost-dance-ep-review
74. ^ 79.Craig Hartranft, “Oceanborn: Hidden from the World,” Danger Dog Music Reviews, 11 December 2013 (4.5/5; names Lee as guitarist and praises his leads, the web comic and the packaging). www.dangerdog.com/2013-music-reviews/oceanborn-hidden-from-the-world.php
75. ^ 80.“Chicago-based progressive metal band Oceanborn…,” Progressive Rock & Progressive Metal E-Zine, 30 August 2013 (names Lee as co-founder and producer; Eyal Levi mixed, Alan Douches mastered; describes the web comic). progrockmetal.blogspot.com/2013/08/chicago-based-progressive-metal-band.html
76. ^ 81.“Contrition: MetalSucks streams Pariahs EP from crust-metal act formed by members of Trouble, Chrome Waves, Yakuza and more,” Infrared Magazine, 16 October 2024 (“Pariahs was recorded by Chris Lee Smith and CONTRITION”); “Album Premiere: Contrition's New EP Pariahs,” MetalSucks, October 2024. infraredmag.com/contrition-metalsucks-streams-pariahs-ep-from-crust-metal-act-formed-by-members-of-trouble-chrome-waves-yakuza-and-more-record-out-friday-on-disorder-recordings
77. ^ 82.Randy “Rocket” Cody, “Oceanborn: Out Now!,” TheMetalDen, 2013 (names Lee as guitarist; notes a play-through video for “The Descent”). themetalden.com/?p=36335

External links

• christophersmith.io, official site
• Christopher Smith on LinkedIn
• atebit on GitHub
• @movepixels on Medium
• @atebitart on Instagram (illustration)
• Christopher Lee (guitarsuxxx) on Linktree, music and video
• Christopher's Production Credits, YouTube playlist
• BLVM3 Studios
• Christopher Lee's Production playlist on Spotify
• Sleep of Mirrors
• DesignCrit.ai
• SumiVibe