Pinned

The destructive allure of the unfinished

Don’t let what you might do blind you to what you’ve already done — I’m mesmerized watching Eva Kalien’s reels of her mixed media sketches, but inevitably I want her to have stopped way sooner than she does. I am drawn to some of Eva Kitok’s early embroidery work, where parts of the composition are outlined with stitch, but otherwise incomplete. Ditto the embroidery…

3 min read

The destructive allure of the unfinished

Published in UX Collective

·Pinned

Find the spark, find your niche

Your favorite work can tell you a lot about your next step. — In July, I will celebrate 25 years of working as a designer. Like many folks, the pandemic has prompted me to take a look back on my career and a look forward to the future. What pieces spark joy at having done them, and what does that tell me? Over…

Career Advice

5 min read

Published in The Memoirist

·Pinned

Sometimes You Have to Sit Down to Stand Up for Yourself

A lesson from Mom — Note: My mother passed away March 26, 2001. This is a memoir-as-letter to her. I never told you about the sit-in I staged at the baseball diamond. But I was following in your footsteps. Or, more accurately, foot stops. I remember hearing the story of the time you staged a…

The Memoirist

3 min read

Sometimes You Have to Sit Down to Stand Up for Yourself

Pinned

The archeology of a design career

What would a future you find excavating the layers of past work? — I recently went down the rabbit hole of the Wayback Machine. My coworkers and I were coming up with concepts for an ugly sweater, and one of us pulled up snapshots of our company’s home pages over the years. Yikes. …

Design Career

4 min read

Published in The Startup

·Pinned

What I Learned on My Way to KonMari-ing My Portfolio

Getting rid of old design work seemed a bridge too far; now I understand why. — Over the past year, I’ve been decluttering, preparing for a move to launch the final phase of life. In my bullet journal, one such task has been carried over month after month, its unfinished status feeling more and more oppressive: culling 20+ years of design samples. Could I KonMari-Method them…

Minimalism

5 min read

What I Learned on My Way to KonMari-ing My Portfolio

13 hours ago

Dear t-shirt: you’ve been cancelled

I cry for my country —

Angst

1 min read

photo of a T-shirt from the National Museum of American History with the letters USA fading out — Photo by the author.

Dear t-shirt: you’ve been cancelled

I cry for my country

Published in The Memoirist

·1 day ago

From Fat Four-Eyes to Four-Sport Athlete

My Title IX story — This is a story about how a law I knew nothing about as a teenager had a lifelong positive influence on me. Metamorphosis I started high school the year that Title IX took effect, 50 years ago this year. Not that I knew about the act. All I knew is that…

Women Athletes

4 min read

From Fat Four-Eyes to Four-Sport Athlete

Published in The Memoirist

·Jun 18

Dad’s Other Life

Remembering a Dad I knew only in glimpses — The pose seems foreign to me: A work pose. A certain jauntiness to the positioning of the hard hat, manspreading. He looks to be caught mid-word. Or maybe he’s chewing gum, which he mostly did at work to keep his mouth moist with saliva to combat the ore dust. The…

Fathers Day

4 min read

Published in Bootcamp

·Jun 13

Re-imagining a website for students

A case study in designing for a different target audience — PBS LearningMedia (PBSLM) is a site designed for K–12 classroom teachers, who can build lessons from more than 20,000 video clips from PBS’s extensive library. The student site provides a launching pad for getting and completing assignments, and hopefully encouraging independent exploration. The problem The original design skewed much younger than the…

Ux Case Study

4 min read