I’m a problem solver with a passion for empowering people to harness technology that enriches their life experiences. I’ve been a digital creative for 30 years, evolving as a graphic designer, multimedia producer, photographer, photo retoucher, videographer, animator, web designer and UX / UI designer, although I’ve always been user-centric in my pursuits. If there is one constant, it is my desire to learn new tools that allow me to communicate more effectively.

I have an obsession with learning how technology works, finding novel ways to integrate those tools to improve life, and sharing that knowledge with anyone who is curious. I was the kid who learned how to program the VCR and couldn’t wait to show my parents or anyone around how it worked.

Learning how things work and knowing how to design interfaces that are both approachable and intuitive requires empathy – a quality I have, often to a fault. My father, who worked for General Motors, would bring home foreign cars that were not available in the U.S. and I couldn’t wait to “explore” them, just sitting in the driveway for hours, trying to figure out what all the buttons and controls did and what the logic was to how they were arranged and how you interacted with them. Unlike U.S. cars at that time, European and Japanese cars used “universal icons” to represent functions with mixed success. When I figured out how to work the navigation system in a Toyota Crown with a mixture of symbols and Japanese syllabic kana, I couldn’t wait to demonstrate it to my father (and my Telecom classmates at MSU). 

I had a similar fascination teaching myself digital design tools, photo editing tools, audio and video editing tools – anything that would allow me to express ideas more effectively. Now, technology is so ubiquitous, even pervasive (with everyone staring at their phones) that it doesn’t create the same “wonder” that it did twenty years ago. The evolution and refinement of “user experience” has been a rewarding transition to witness. Gone are the days when programmers and engineers would write software in isolation that would accomplish a “specification” and when it was completed the designers were invited to come in and make it “look pretty”. I was always a user-centric designer paddling against that current, but now the industry is embracing the notion that good products begin and end with the user, and I can’t wait to take it to the next level.

CV available upon request.

Toolbox: