Howell&Gibbs

§00 — The studio

A studio that designs & builds tools for the parts of life that should be simpler.

Howell & Gibbs is a two-principal design and engineering practice in New York City, founded by Holly Gibbs and Liam Howell. We work mostly in civic tech, and on software that has to be careful with people’s time, money, and information.

Case 001

SendTax · In progress

Availability

July–October

Reply time

Usually within a day

Office

New York City

§01 — How we work

The approach

Two principals. No juniors, no handoffs, no project managers between you and the people doing the work. Holly leads design. Liam leads engineering. We sit at the same table.

We’ve shipped together, and each of us has shipped civic-tech work the other helped sharpen. We know how design and engineering have to talk to each other inside regulated work, because we are both sides of the conversation — and our next projects are already underway.

Principal · Design

Holly Gibbs

Holly has spent fourteen years as a product designer, most recently leading UX at Google on tools that turn regulatory complexity into workflows non-specialists can actually use. Her thread is designing for people who’ve historically been treated as edge cases.

Principal · Engineering

Liam Howell

Liam has spent the last decade building software where money is real — most recently at Guideline on systems for 401(k)-backed loans, before that on distributed ledger infrastructure for mortgages and private equity. He cares about the parts of the software you don’t see.

§02 — What we offer

The services

We take on whole projects, not pieces. When you hire Howell & Gibbs, you get a designer and an engineer who’ve already shipped together — and a practice that covers both halves of the work.

  1. 01

    Product design and direction

    Strategy and definition, user research, information architecture, UX and UI, design systems, accessibility built in from the start. The work of getting to the right thing before getting to the screens.

  2. 02

    Engineering and infrastructure

    Production builds, secure backends, public-data ingestion, APIs, encryption and identity, AI-assisted tooling and domain-specific models. The work of making it actually run.

  3. 03

    Service design and practice consulting

    Mapping services across teams and touchpoints, facilitation, alignment, design and engineering operations, accessibility audits. For organizations bringing complex systems to people who shouldn’t have to translate.

We take a small number of clients each year and we take them seriously.

§03 — Who we work with

The clients

Civic tech and public-interest organizations. NYC government and local agencies, and the nonprofits and tools that work alongside them. Teams in tax, benefits, healthcare, and the parts of finance where someone is filling out a form they don’t want to be filling out.

If the screen has someone’s paperwork, money, or attention on it, we want to make it less stressful to look at.

§04 — In progress

The work

  1. 2026 — present

    SendTax

    Tax document intake for tax professionals. Co-founders, designed and built end-to-end.

    User experienceProductEngineeringAISecOps
  2. 2026

    Tenant Triage NYC

    Civic-tech site that helps New York City tenants understand their rights and decide what to do next.

    User experienceCivic techProductSecOps
  3. 2026

    GovRoll

    Civic-tech product with AI on the backend — domain-specific models supporting government and public-interest workflows. Designed and built end-to-end: interface, backend infrastructure, and the models that power it.

    Civic techProductEngineeringAISecOps

§05 — Start a conversation

Contact

Tell us what you’re building. The hard parts, the stuck parts, the parts you can’t tell if you should be doing yourselves.

hello@howellandgibbs.com

We answer every email, usually within a day.