A design problem that I initially didn’t think was solvable until I actually tried to solve it.
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!
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
I spoke with Melanie Richards from Badass Lady Creatives in an interview published on Design Work Life.
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.