About me

My whole life has been defined by a sense of curiosity and an excitement about learning new things. I came by a lot of my curiosity naturally as a side effect of growing up with teachers for parents. My parents encouraged me to read and took me and my sister on lots of educational vacations, and that sparked a lifelong interest in history. Music was also important in our house growing up, and music education is a tradition that goes back for generations on both sides of the family.

I’m a designer who is always experimenting with new tools and reading so I can become a more well-rounded thinker. Design is a learning profession—if you don’t absolutely love to learn new things you can’t be successful in the long run. It brings me a lot of joy to learn something new and share it with others.

Experience

Right now I’m a Principal Product Designer at Paylocity, where I’m leading the design for the company’s new native mobile apps as we transition away from a hybrid app.

Before Paylocity I worked at an agency called Vokal where I created cross-platform experiences, and the design systems required to support them. Before that I worked at Maddock Douglas, an innovation firm in the Chicago suburbs. At MD I used my prototyping skills to help our clients see into the future.

My background

Front-end knowledge

The best thing I ever did for myself was take the time to learn HTML and CSS. We were designing our first websites in school and were supposed to use Dreamweaver to build them. I knew that wasn’t the proper way to make a website, so rather than learn Dreamweaver I learned how to write HTML and CSS. After school I taught myself PHP by hacking together Wordpress themes, and eventually I learned JavaScript. These skills have led to every professional opportunity I’ve ever had. I’ve continued to expand my front end skills and depend on them to communicate with engineering teams and prototype ideas every day. I built this website using React and Next.js.

Design education

I went to school for traditional graphic design. My education was grounded in durable principles of good design, rather than software skills that would become outdated the second I left school. NIU taught me what good looks like, and how to think like a designer in any medium. Early in the program I only wanted to learn about more design tools, but I’ve realized that they got it right by leading with design fundamentals.

Passion for writing

Writing is a sort of test for me. If I find that I can write about something clearly, that usually means I understand it. I know I have a long way to go on my writing journey, but I’m passionate about it and enjoy the process.