Notes

Try everything

A design problem that I initially didn’t think was solvable until I actually tried to solve it.

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Website archive

I published past layouts for my personal site dating back to 2002.

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Good challenges vs. bad challenges (Etsy last lecture)

My Last Lecture at Etsy where I reflect on different challenges I encountered, and determining whether they were the “good” or “bad” kind of challenging.

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Inside Design interview with InVision

Catt Small and I recently did an interview with InVision for their interview series Inside Design. We spoke about what it was like designing for Etsy’s buyers and sellers and our design team culture. We also had a super fun photoshoot slash brainstorming session with our design teammates in Brooklyn Bridge Park!

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Starting every day at zero

At my very first job, every employee had to take the Strengthsfinder quiz. The quiz is a series of statements that you agree or disagree with, and at the end of the quiz you get a list of your top 5 strengths. The idea is that by identifying your strengths, it sets you up to maximize them at work. At the top of my list was Achiever.

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Crying

On crying at work, and that time it got to be too much to handle.

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Crafting an effective working group

At Etsy, some of the most interesting (and most difficult!) challenges we face as a design team don’t always have a clear or obvious owner. Our initiatives can span multiple product teams or even multiple disciplines. Without a dedicated team of people solving these problems, they’re easy to ignore.

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Design Details episode 81, live at Etsy

Bryn Jackson and Brian Lovin run Design Details, an interview podcast with designers. They came to Etsy to do a recording of a panel-style interview with me, Justin Edmond, and Joel Califa. It was super fun but a little scary—it was recorded in front of a live audience! I had a ton of fun talking about things like how we all became designers, management vs. individual contributor roles, and Neopets.

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Sharing Our Work: Testing and Feedback in Design on A List Apart

I had the honor of writing an article for A List Apart on the role research can play as we make our way through the design process. I had been reading A List Apart and referencing it since the earliest days that I was building websites, so this opportunity was especially exciting to me!

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Redesigning with Confidence at Industry Conf

This past April I spoke at Industry Conf in Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom. Industry Conf covers practical topics about the web, ranging from research to design to backend development.

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Post on Code as Craft

Today we launched a huge redesign of Etsy’s seller tools that was the culmination of over a year’s worth of work (more on this later). I contributed to a post on Code as Craft, Etsy’s engineering blog, on some of the interesting technical challenges we faced and what happens when you have a blank canvas with which to work.

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2015

The other day I had a yoga-fueled epiphany.

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Balance

This week the project that I had been working on for the past nine months launched to an open prototype. It was a huge undertaking. It may be the hardest project I’ve worked on. It’ll easily be the most trafficked. I’m incredibly proud of the work my fantastic team and I did. And I’m proud of myself, but for slightly different reasons.

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Pricing my embroidery

Pricing your work is hard. Whether you’re a freelancer or you sell handmade goods, putting a value on something you’ve created is tough. It requires balancing a competitive rate with paying yourself what your time is worth, and for many people (myself included), it’s easy to undervalue your time.

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Huge flea market

On Tuesday, March 18th, Huge is having a flea market for local Brooklyn artists from 5:30-8PM. I’ll be selling emoji embroidery there AND introducing a new pattern. Come hang!

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What blameless really means

On blamelessness and applying it to yourself, too.

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Building Erin Nolan's website

For the past three weeks, I’ve worked with my best friend and fellow designer Erin Nolan on rebuilding her website to be fresh, flexible, and easily updatable. Her last site ran on Wordpress, and while it made sense for her to use a CMS to manage her site, Wordpress wasn’t cutting it. After redoing my own site with Siteleaf and having a really good experience, we decided to give it a go.

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New year, new challenges

My first job in high school was at a small store in the Washington DC-area called Appalachian Spring where I sold jewelry, pottery, glass, and other crafts made by American artists. It’s at Appalachian Spring where I developed a passion for all things handmade. I credit my time there (among other sources) with my desire to support artists, which brought me to New York to work at Kickstarter over two years ago.

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2013 reflections

I can be really bad at stopping to reflect on my accomplishments, but so much has happened this year that I feel really great about. Here are some things from the past year of which I’m most proud (in no particular order):

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Emoji embroidery: a post-mortem

On Thursday night, my emoji embroidery was part of the first-ever emoji pop-up market at Eyebeam Art+Technology Center in Chelsea. I had no idea what I was doing when I started. Here’s what I learned.

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Interview with Badass Lady Creatives

I spoke with Melanie Richards from Badass Lady Creatives in an interview published on Design Work Life.

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Emoji Pop-up Market

I’m excited to announce that on December 12th I’ll be a seller in the first-ever Emoji Pop-up Market as part of the Emoji Art and Design Show. I’ve been embroidering emoji day and night in preparation and will be selling thumbs ups, poops, and dancers. Come by to check out the art show, say hi, and buy some handcrafted emoji!

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I made a :poop:

This is the first of many, many poops.

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A redesign with Siteleaf

The last time I redid my website was almost exactly two years ago. I was ready to leave my job and needed a refreshed portfolio. (Side note: why are so many of us terrible about updating our websites unless we’re looking for a job?) It had been a bit of time since I built a website from start to finish (designers at that company weren’t allowed to touch code), and I spent a three-day weekend proudly handcoding my brand new site. It was a completely static site with no templating and probably some terribly-written CSS, but it worked.

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Scare yourself

Six months ago today I moved from a small town in southwest Virginia to New York City. I came up here with just a duffel bag, a suitcase, and a backpack. I slept on an air mattress in my friend’s living room in Bushwick for three weeks until I was able to move into an apartment in Brooklyn Heights. I sold my car, got rid of a third of my wardrobe, and moved to a city that’s basically the opposite of the place I had been living for the past six years. After working at a digital advertising agency for almost three years, I decided that I wanted to switch industries and quit my first job as an adult. To say my life has been full of changes in the past six months would be quite the understatement.

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Jessica Harllee is a staff product designer in Brooklyn, an avid crafter, and an amateur writer.