Throughout my design career I've been constantly drawn to thinking about how technology can create a sense of magic in life. I've spent a lot oftime imagining—helped by my drawing, my love of fantasy novels, and gaming (pen and paper as well as video)—and thinking about how I can bring the of idea of magic, in one of the many forms it may take, into life. It's one of the reasons I started studying game art and design.
The biggest revelation that it could actually happen was at my first design job as a graphic designer at a startup called Oubly.
I started what would later become Oubly (we didn't even have the name yet) as a freelance designer illustrating and typesetting stationery, but was brought in-house early on as one of the initial team members. I love illustration and typography and I felt very comfortable with the assignments, though they were staggering in volume. It was a very special time for me, not only because it was my first full-time design job and but I actually felt very well equipped (I had been very nervous about being able to keep up). I was not only able to maintain the core product output, but also help with the user interface design of the product's dashboard, light web development, and even some automation through scripting; I found it exhilirating.
The startup office was very small and we worked long hours trying to get the appropriate amount of content and the foundation for what would become an e-commerce platform a year later.
Being able to contribute to evolving chaotic spreadsheets, information architecture on a whiteboard, and light drawings on paper to a transforming into a digital experience that really started to get me thinking about what is possible with design and development; I realized I could actually design things and they can become real experiences — from physical products to the digital side that creates them, all the way to the website that lets users place orders and the dashboard that manages those orders.
[in progress]