My Road to Design

As a native of a small town just north of San Francisco, I grew up around artists. Both of my parents are writers and jewelers, and my mom a photographer. From a young age I knew I was a bit different than the other students I attended school with. Math and science didn’t make sense to me, but photography and art did. I carried around a disposable camera everywhere I went, and once I was in 8th grade my mom bought me my first ever film camera. I started shooting black and white film and developing prints in the darkroom when I was 13. The excitement I felt when I saw the photograph suddenly appear after I put the print in the developer was a feeling I had never experienced before. I would create murals of my prints on my walls and juxtapose them in ways I thought looked beautiful. I began studying famous photographers and found the work of Richard Avedon and Diane Arbus fascinating. I was always in awe how their photographs captured real, raw human emotion so artfully. The way their portraits could conjure such intense emotions in you moved me immensely, and I remember thinking how badly I wanted to be able to do that with my work someday. I practiced photography all throughout high school and even received a scholarship for college my senior year.

After a few years of wandering and working in various roles, I made a good friend who introduced me to sales. I worked as an inside sales rep for a while at a couple cybersecurity companies, but the monotonous work of sending emails and the terrifying act of cold calling was not up my alley. I knew it was time I figured out what I truly wanted to do. I wanted to combine my love of photography and design with my interest in technology and turn it into a career. I did hours of research and that’s when I found it: UI/UX design. I started thinking back to all the lead generation software applications I had used while I was in sales, and how often I found myself saying, who the heck designed this?! The UX is atrocious, and the UI is confusing. I know how I’d fix it. It was the aha moment that I had been searching for for years.

I’ve always had an enormously deep passion for finding the most efficient solutions to client and business problems, and I love the idea of creating beautiful, seamless user experiences through design. I am beyond excited that I get to make my childhood dream of designing something that moves people into a lifelong career.

Thanks for reading,