My Design Life
I am currently attending Utah Valley University studying Interaction Design. I have fallen in love with the work we get to do at the University. I enjoy designing screens of all sizes, creating branding for all types of clients, and researching and designing documentation. On a more personal side I’m a father to a beautiful little girl and a husband to a fantastic woman who supports me in all the work I do.
My Life Before Design
My journey to the world of design has been longer than I would have liked. I was raised by an engineer, both of my brothers studied engineering as did most of my close friends so when I got to college there seemed to be only one option for me. After two semesters of Calculus and Physics I realized this really wasn’t the field for me so I went heavily into my minor at the time, Computer Science. I enjoyed writing code and seeing results right away, but after the 20+ hour projects where I was looking for a needle in a haystack I realized this too might not be for me. I figured out what I really liked was the immediate visual results from coding so I started creating small websites, teaching myself HTML, CSS and JavaScript. After an introductory course in Digital Media at UVU I discovered Adobe Illustrator which finally took me completely from development to the design world.
My Life with Design
After my first class was spent researching and redesigning a website for a local non-profit I realized how fulfilling this work can be. I enjoyed researching user pain points, and optimizing business goals in a site design. Finding and solving problems visually is the experience I wanted in my Computer Science days, but now I could do everything visually. Even planning projects and doing user research was never a plain text file, I would either sketchnote everything or design research documents optimized for readability.
Through my school and personal projects working with people (a team or client) has been generally a joy. I have always seen the benefit of having people around to bounce ideas off of and being around similarly motivated people helps me stay motivated during projects. My professors act more like clients than standard teachers, they have high expectations for my work and allow for creative freedom as long as the stated problem gets solved.
After a couple semesters of learning the basics of digital product design I have become observant (my wife would say annoyingly observant) of the products I use. I take note of inconsistencies within apps, pain points that can be fixed, and generally poor user experiences. These observations have helped my research for new projects as I go back to notes I joted down from these experiences I can see where industry products haven’t hit the mark and avoid their mistakes.
Now that I have found what I want to do during and after college I need to create a roadmap for my career.
My Future Design Life
Through my education at UVU I’ve had time to start thinking of goals for graduation, entry-level work and a further career. On the graduation level my goals include finding a great internship, and networking with my peers. Both goals lead me to the rest of my career. Directly after college I want to work for a large company like Adobe or a large design firm. This will hopefully let me hone my skills from school, and let me know how a design based company works in the “real world.” After this job I want to work at a small firm while freelancing on my own. Ideally I would go full freelancing after around a decade of working within a couple companies. It would be exciting, but very challenging, to work completely on my own and start up my own company.
With those kind of goals I need to focus myself on developing skills and meeting people in the industry, luckily I love what I do so maybe I’ll look back in 30 years and not have worked a day in my life.
