I'm a UI and UX designer with experience in end-to-end digital product design, from research to branding, mockups to front-end coding. Projects that excite me the most involve distilling information into slick visuals and pleasing micro-interactions.
As a kid, I spent free time poking at anemones and catching tiny fish in tidepools. I watched the sea lions tousle and humpback whales spout offshore.
At the same time, I loved art. When the Tempera paints came out, I created blobby, smiling sea creatures. When I wasn't at the beach, I meticulously filled in ever more complicated coloring books.
My mind was geared to be a designer, but at the time I wasn't aware of the field of digital product design.
So, I followed my other passion and studied ocean resource management. College and graduate school were rich with natural and social sciences, I had a stint on Capitol hill, and for five years I was a consultant at a small firm, helping conservation groups set strong strategies.
This all made sense on the surface - after all, the natural environment, and especially the ocean, is important to me and I was helping conserve it.
My career in conservation just didn’t feel right.
While I love the natural environment, I don’t love the work of a traditional environmental professional.
In the office and classroom, what I enjoyed most was problem-solving the best way to convey information visually.
Here’s what was happening under the surface:
At college -- Alongside environmental studies, I completed a minor in art. My favorite assignment was to create a series of miniature pencil drawings. Naturally, I drew a collection of sea creatures. I then expanded the collection and ran a little business selling prints.
In graduate school -- For my group master’s thesis, one of my roles was designer of our public-facing work. You could find me up late adjusting colors, creating custom animations, and geeking out whenever I landed on a data visualization that clicked.
As a consultant -- The most exciting thing was figuring out how to display our research findings with graphs, infographics, and writing. (I also managed to design a few company holiday cards along the way.)
So, I decided to do more of what I like best: design.
I quit my job and entered a digital product design program through Bloc.
Here are a few of the similarities I’ve found:
Take the research process. As a consultant, I led numerous online surveys and stakeholder interviews, analyzed the data, and drew out key findings to act on. Sounds pretty familiar to a UX research process, right?
Also, working with clients. There’s a lot to be said about delivering for clients, whether internal or external to the company. Designers and consultants both do a lot of this.
And you’ve got to be good at learning on the fly and working cross-functionally. Consultants and designers wear many hats, from researcher to facilitator to liaison.
In the end, the goal of a consultant and a designer is to find a solution to a problem.
We both package the solution in a way that the target audience can understand and use. Designers just get to have more fun making it look and feel good.
Whether for an environmental cause or not, I want to design experiences that make sense, look good, and convey valuable information.
Run in the East Bay hills
Swim in outdoor pools
Backpack in the Sierras
Scuba dive
Invent recipes with farmers market vegetables
Explore a new country - mostly in the southern hemisphere to date
I have a cat who plays fetch.
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“I Love Lucy” has forever been my favorite TV show.
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Eons ago I was a competitive jump-roper.
