Burton Rast

Burton Rast is a design leader, artist, mentor, investor, and public speaker based in San Francisco, California, with a career spanning more than two decades in product leadership, creative direction, and design innovation. Rast's experience encompasses product leadership, creative direction, design innovation, storytelling, photography, and filmmaking. As a Principal Designer at Adobe, Rast applies expertise in user experience, digital product design, and creative strategy, developed through roles at influential organizations in the design and technology industries.

Before joining Adobe, Rast served as a Principal Designer at IDEO, where he led project teams, designed and hosted mentorship workshops, and worked to advance literacy in emerging technologies within IDEO and client organizations. He later held a UX leadership position at Google, where he led the development of a design system for private modes across flagship products including Search, Maps, Chrome, and YouTube. Rast also instructed at Google's Sprint Leadership Academy, teaching the design sprint process and mentoring colleagues across multiple product teams.

A lifelong designer and data privacy advocate, Rast emphasizes the responsibility of designers to create equitable systems that honor privacy as a fundamental human right. He has consulted for companies ranging from startups to Fortune 50 enterprises and serves as a Design Partner at Strange Ventures, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm, advising and investing in early-stage artificial intelligence startups. Rast's entrepreneurial projects include "Lightroom Coach," an AI teaching assistant integrated into Adobe Lightroom, and "The Next Four Years," a novel that uses artificial intelligence to rewrite itself daily based on the 24-hour news cycle.

Rast is an advocate for mentorship and knowledge-sharing, regularly lecturing at conferences, companies, and universities on topics related to design leadership, user experience, and creative innovation. His photographs have been featured by Apple, NBC, PetaPixel, Fstoppers, designboom, Cult of Mac, and CNN, reflecting his multidisciplinary approach to design and visual storytelling.