My Story

The early days

I got my start in design when I was 18 years old after a teacher recommended me for an internship at Corbin Design, a local design firm specializing in large signage programs for public spaces—hospitals, civic buildings, and airports. While at Corbin, I helped design wayfinding signage for the emergency room at a local hospital. Immediately I was hooked, and while I was completely unaware of the impact this experience would have on me, it was one of the critical moments in my pursuing a career in design.

Interactive Television

Five years later, I was living in Los Angeles and about to graduate from the Art Center College of Design when I took a job with AND Interactive. AND was a small “interactive” design agency working mainly on interactive television (ITV) prototypes for its parent company TCI, one of the largest cable companies in the US at the time. We were a small team of designers and technologists creating prototypes for two proposed high-speed internet services; one for TCI called The @home Network and a similar service for Telecom Italia called Stream. At the time, DSL was slow, and these companies were betting on their cable infrastructure to deliver high-speed content across the internet. Everything about this work was bleeding-edge and new; streaming video, video navigation, and finding better ways to search using a TV remote control. We were constantly hoping our prototypes wouldn’t crash during testing or when showing them to executives and investors like John Dorrer (though I had no idea who he was at the time). 

The Dot-Com Era

In 1995 AND closed its doors, and I was out of a job. A colleague and I reached out to Bill Gross at Idealab. Bill had just founded Idealab (arguably the world’s first startup incubator) with about 20 companies in various stages of development. Working with Bill, we began developing an idea for a home buying/selling service, “HomeLink,” but quickly moved on to another idea for an e-commerce company which we later named “eToys.” We quickly created several prototypes that proved instrumental in recruiting the leadership team and securing additional funding, then continued working with the team to define the service and initial site design. During my time at Idealab, I learned the importance of rapid prototyping and the value it can offer during the early stages of a project. In 2000, less than two years after our first prototype, eToys became the second most trafficked website on the internet and the largest toy store in the world.

Fast-forward to the late ’90s. I moved to San Francisco to work for Clement Mok at Studio Archetype. Clement, who had been the creative director at Apple in the 1980s, understood the impact digital media was having on the world, and Studio Archetype was one of a few design agencies working almost exclusively on digial media projects. As a Design Director at Studio Archetype, I helped design and lead the ground-up design of Realtor.com and Hallmark.com while working on smaller projects for Sony and Infoseek. The Hallmark project was a unique collaboration with Sapient, which led to Sapient acquiring Studio Archetype in 1998. Our partnership with Sapient on Hallmark was a first for design and big tech and was instrumental in establishing Sapient’s early design practice. While at Studio Archetype, I learned how to produce design at scale, work with large cross-disciplinary teams, and manage multiple clients.

The 2000s

Following my time at Studio Archetype, I worked for SYPartners helping companies like Hewlett-Packard, Herman Miller, Juniper Bank, Peoplesoft, and PWC articulate visions for change. The work at SYPartners was unique in that we were part management consultancy and part design studio, which enabled us to work with companies in a way that was unlike other agencies at the time and often with C-level executives. While at SYPartners, I learned to appreciate the importance of establishing a narrative first, then aligning people and project initiatives (and ultimately artifacts) around that narrative. I learned to work in various capacities (as a maker and advisor) across multiple media types, digital, print, and environmental spaces.

Following my time at SYPartners, I started consulting with several early-stage startups in various capacities, often bringing in other consultants and freelancers from my network. My clients included technology platform startup AutoReturn, price comparison giant NexTag and UK-based secondary ticketing platform Seatwave, which later became one of Europe's largest secondary ticket sellers.

London Calling

In 2011 I was hired by Time Out as a consultant, then later moved to London to take a position as Global Creative Director, responsible for building and leading design for all of Time Out’s digital products worldwide. Time Out had just received private equity investment and was beginning a major transformation journey from print to digital. Building and leading a small team of cross-functional designers, we worked closely with editorial teams in multiple cities to create a unified customer experience across mobile, tablet, and web. Reporting to the CEO, I was an executive leadership team member. While at Time Out, I learned the importance of a shared vision for the company’s products and culture (especially among the leadership team) and the profound impact it can have on a company’s success, especially during a major transformation. 

Banking

After several years in London, I moved back to San Francisco to take a position at Capital One as VP of Design. There I led design for Capital One’s website (the company’s primary acquisition channel and revenue driver), the customer account experience, and the internal design pattern and component library. In addition, I worked closely with the brand team to better align efforts between brand and digital product design teams. Working at Capital One, I learned how to manage large-scale teams across multiple stakeholder groups, grow a multi-disciplinary design organization, and prioritize our work to provide the best customer experience while creating a meaningful impact for the business.