I’m a currently a UX designer for the web with 12 years’ experience serving higher education, now looking to advance my career into a leadership position with a marketing and/or communications team. With an academic background in language arts, visual arts, and education, I bring value in artistic vision, clear communication, information organization, technical execution, and teamwork. I thrive on creating quality work with good people in a goal-oriented, good-humored, collegial environment.

I came to design work via an unconventional path, which has given me unique perspectives and abilities that have proven very valuable in the field of marketing and communications.  I entered the professional world as a stem cell with an English degree and fine art minor and dedicated the first year of my professional life to a volunteer program—the Jesuit Volunteer Corps—working as a crisis counselor for homeless teenagers in Portland, Oregon.  After that, I moved south to the San Francisco Bay Area and worked as a volunteer coordinator at the San Francisco Food Bank, training and supervising large corporate groups as well as participants in the city’s welfare-to-work program.  Both jobs taught me the importance of humility and empathy when leading and working alongside diverse groups of people toward a common goal.

Though I didn’t realize it at the time, my next step set me down the road toward a career in design.  I entered a graduate program in education at the The University of California, Berkleley and became a licensed high school English teacher in California and, later, in New Jersey.  Much of the skill and experience I rely on today was forged in those classrooms, both as a student and as a teacher.  I learned very quickly that writing curriculua, at its core, is a design process: starting with a goal and a group of “users” and working backwards to plan a detailed, multi-step path to success.  It involves anticipation of your users’ needs and helpful scaffolding for them every step of the way.  There’s nothing quite like the immediacy of testing a design in front of over 140 demanding teenagers every day in order to validate it.  It is a terrifying proving ground.

What ultimately led me to leave the classroom was an itch. I was helping students develop their creative potential and practical skills, but my own felt neglected and unused.  I wanted to put my intrisic abilities with the pen and the stylus—as writer and artist and thinker—to direct use.  So when my wife launched her career as a professor and we moved to a new state, I took the opportunity to branch out into a new career: first as a freelance copywriter, and then, as the world of web communications opened up to me, as front-end web designer and user experience designer.  Eventually I amassed enough of a portfolio to land my current position in those roles as the web and UX designer for the University of Alabama in Huntsville’s marketing and communications division.  Here I’ve enjoyed the opportunity to work collaboratively as a specialist on a team, learning from other specialists, and developing rapport and camaraderie with talented colleagues.  Our team is small and agile, requiring us to move quickly, cover each other, and, to my satisfaction and delight, assume positions of leadership and management over projects that have a direct impact on the university’s lifeblood need: the attraction and retention of students.