I have been a UX/UI designer since the early days of the graphical web, long before anyone was talking about designing the user experience. (Well, Don Norman was; the rest of us hadn't caught up to him yet.) Because I remember the pre-CSS era of hand-coding HTML for every page in SimpleText, I am grateful for our contemporary work flows that use Figma/XD/Sketch with WordPress or another CMS.
I believe that good design is industry-agnostic, and I have approached all my design roles as versions of user experience design, interaction design, and information architecture extended and translated into other fields and media. For example, my work with museums involved addressing every aspect of the presentation and revelation of objects and their associated visual information through the exhibition design. This, coupled with managing visitor flows and creating clear wayfinding, helped tell a story about the displayed artwork. I collaborated closely with the curator, conservator, and preparator to create these vivid, innovative museum experiences.
I designed scenic environments for over 150 plays and operas in the United States and Europe, fostering human interactions through visual, spatial, and kinetic storytelling. I was a lead artist on several award-winning productions that I developed and designed, including "Boozy: The life, death, and subsequent vilification of Le Corbusier and, more importantly, Robert Moses" (an unexpected downtown hit about urban planning); and "Orpheus," a rock opera retelling of the myth for post-9/11 New York that was selected for inclusion in the US pavilion at the 2007 Prague Quadrennial of Design.
Currently, I also work as both a writer and a copy editor, with my focus in each on fantasy, science fiction, and game writing. I believe in Oxford commas, semi-colons, and em dashes. I wish the subjunctive were held in higher regard.
As a kid in the 1980s I read my first fantasy and science fiction novels, ran my first D&D campaign, and played my first computer RPG. I haven’t stopped doing any of these since.
