About Me
About Me
I began my career as a coder. Curiosity led me to design. Logic brought me close to UX. Throughout my career, I've continued to explore and learn all three disciplines simultaneously, as they exist hand in hand in every form of digital production. An understanding of all three allows me to question and answer things from multiple perspectives. My coder hat discovers and plays with new technologies. The designer hat finds new ways to utilize them. And the UX hat ensures it makes sense to everyone other than myself.
I've been working in the digital creative field since 1995, from CD-Roms and floppy disk demos to the never-ending fractal blossoming of the internet. Over the years, I've also picked up experience doing motion graphics in After Effects, video editing in Final Cut Pro and some very minor 3D modeling in Google Sketchup. I've gained modest experience managing my own servers through the command line with the traditional LAMP stack as well as the emerging node.js platform with MongoDB.
I particularly enjoy playing with JavaScript, a language so easy to adopt, seemingly endless in possibilities, and deceptively powerful across many platforms. More and more often, I find myself beginning the design process with code, because design essentially starts with a concept, a "what if?". What if I could build a fully-managed video feed interface for TV screens purely in JavaScript? What if I could build a mini-video game that could be played in an HTML5 iPad ad? As soon as I think of that "what if?", I set about to see if it's possible and begin to write code. Often, the design simply happens in the code, and I've bypassed Photoshop and Illustrator completely. Always, the code informs the UX, because you're using the actual interface as it's being built, not in your head, on paper or a whiteboard as in a traditional UX process. Sometimes the code is just an experiment. Sometimes it becomes the final deliverable. But it's initial purpose is always to explore "what if?".
Personal stuff
I grew up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Reside in Los Angeles. In between, I've lived in New York, Hawaii, and San Francisco. I have a video of my cat that has over 14 million views. My highest doodle jump score is 613,911 which lasted 58 minutes 58 seconds. My highest Temple Run score is 10,543,298 with a distance of 50,787m.
