Real quick, a bit about me
Born when I was young, raised in the Bay Area, and educated at UCLA with a degree in Design | Media Arts, I fell in love with UX design and never looked back. Los Angeles didn’t suit me at the time, so I moved to San Francisco for a forever to truly dig into my life and career. Now I’m back in LA and it’s... fine. I’m mainly avoiding the sun, while genuinely trying to take advantage of the diversity, art, and snacks the city has to offer.
Outside of design, I play video games, I shoot film photography, visit ghost towns, and read a lot. I’m terrible at frisbee, but excellent at Ms. Pac-Man. I am intensely curious and in love with everything, which is honestly kind of exhausting.
If you’re curious about ghost town logistics, arcade techniques, or if you just want to talk about design strategy, let's connect.
Experience
Affinity Mapping for Liiiiiiiiiiiife
If I could affinity map all day long, I would. It’s one of my favorite things (like, in life, not just design, if I could affinity map which sandwich I should get, I’d do that too). I love how, from a pile of notes, inputs, concepts, whatever...things that seem to have no relationship, overlaps being to emerge. Those initial overlaps can then be sub-divided or smaller sets regrouped, and out of it all common themes begin to emerge. And with that, the design process can proceed. It rules.
Bad Ideas are Good
There have been so many times where I’ve started a sentence or a sketch or an idea and knew immediately it was trash. But I let the thought play-out. Even the bad ideas have to be explored as they show the edges of where things should, or could, go. They are topic-starters and a place where another idea can come from. So I keep them out, in pile in the corner. They also made solid team room decor (back when we had team rooms).
I was Writing about AI before ai was cool
I like to say I cut my teeth as a UX Designer at Punchcut, a San Francisco design agency dedicated to designing emergent, future-forward experiences. I liked them so much, I worked there twice. In 2017, during one of my tenures there, I was asked to author a piece on what my (and by extension Punchcut’s) thoughts were around artificial intelligence. So here it is.
Weapon of Choice: Post Its
This is what you get when you search “Post Its” on my Google Photos. What did I ever do without them? Shh. I don’t even want to think about it.
Accessibility
Taking a quick pause from the general levity of this section to call out something that is about as serious for me as it gets: accessible design. The flattening of digital experiences to be usable across all people of varying abilities is an area I am deeply passionate about. I’m still learning, and by no means claim I am an expert, but I have taken every opportunity available to me to learn more about accessible design. This has included working on accessible design systems, conducting AA compliance audits, and updating established content to be more inclusive.
Architecture is Hard
IA maps, despite their importance, drive me crazy. It feels like the 2-D diagram never quite works. But I do it because it’s, you know, my job.
Gonzo
I don’t know what this is from, but I like the fact that Hunter Thompson is in it so that’s why it’s here.
That Cat I draw
Whenever I am mulling something over or need a break from staring at my computer screen, I doodle this little cat. My coworkers at Faire noticed this and made a bunch of swag for the design team. Honestly, I think my career peaked with this.
My Bun. My black.
At some point I realized that my tendency to throw my hair up into a bun became a defining feature I have. The other is that I almost exclusively wear black. So if you’re going to wear a Chelsea costume, you wear black and put your hair in a bun, as evidenced by my coworker’s at my remote going away party. (I also tend to have some cat in space with a synthesizer as my meeting background.)
This has to be fun
If there is one thing I am committed to, it is that everything I work on and everything I do HAS to have some element of fun in it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a serious designer who takes serious things, uh, seriously. All I’m saying is that I’ll probably be giggling while I do it. But if I’m being honest, I really just added this so I could look back at old photos and see all the fun I’ve had doing this job.