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…

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…

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. …

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…

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…

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…