A Designer’s Journey: From Neopets to Khan Academy
An interview with Blueprint alumna Elizabeth Lin about her journey as a designer and her experiences at Khan Academy
How did you get into design?
This is the first logo I designed! I drew it with MS Paint for my “Design Agency” on Neopets. In case you’ve never played, Neopets is a virtual world of pets, petpets, and petpetpets 🐶. I learned how to customize my profile page with basic styling and created custom banners for my Neofriends. In fact, I credit Neopets for introducing me to life skills & drawing graphics on a computer.
Growing up, I didn’t really know what design was. I just loved being creative and making things. I chose to study computer science in college because I thought I wanted to specialize in computer graphics, “drawing graphics on a computer”. Clearly, I had no idea what computer graphics actually entailed.
Throughout my time at Cal, so many clubs, events, people, classes, and experiences contributed to my discovery of design. There isn’t a succinct way of describing my path because it was so nonlinear, but I got to where I am today by pursuing things I enjoyed doing 😊.
What brought you to Khan Academy?
During my sophomore year, I got the opportunity to teach the Illustrator & Photoshop DeCal. I had never taught before, so I didn’t know what to expect 😱. It turned out to be the most rewarding experience I had during college. I loved watching students grow from drawing simple shapes to designing their own movie posters. At the time, Cal lacked an official design program, so DeCals were the only way students could get exposure to design!
Through teaching the DeCal, I knew I wanted to work in the education space, but wasn’t sure where. I happened upon Khan Academy during a career fair. I had no idea they even had an internship program, so I was surprised to learn that they took design in addition to engineering interns! I loved every minute of my internship and you can read more about it here. Khan Academy has been a really unique place to work because everyone is driven by the same mission: Free, world-class education for everyone, everywhere.
What are some unique design problems you’ve encountered at Khan Academy?
Khan Academy offers content across math, science, and the humanities. It’s difficult to balance designing for all these domains. For example, math teachers define mastery and success differently from history teachers. Math is more easily evaluated with exercise questions while history depends heavily on critical thinking skills. Our team isn’t large enough to design separate experiences that optimize for every subject, so we have to design an experience that’s flexible enough to accommodate for all teachers.
What pieces of work are you most proud of?
We recently had our annual Harry Potter-themed Hackathon week and I loved designing materials for it. Here’s a peek at the Hogwarts house shirt designs:
I’m also designing ways to surface student progress to teachers. Right now, it’s difficult for teachers to find where students have gaps in their knowledge, so we are experimenting with ways to show answer history and trends in learning.
This is a view that teachers can project while students are doing practice in-class:
Because the progress bars here are anonymous, students have a shared sense of accomplishment when an entire skill turns gold. I’m really excited for this be available to teachers in the fall!
What is something that you want to get better at?
I want to get better at motion and animation! I’m inspired by animated films and want to learn how to incorporate moving illustrations into my work.
Any advice for aspiring designers at Cal?
Take a class with Maker Lab access! Those classes tend to be interdisciplinary, so the project prompts are interesting and you’ll meet students outside your field of study.
Follow Elizabeth on Medium or Twitter, or reach out to her by email: elizabethylin@gmail.com
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