Here's the
story so far.

I left a college that wasn't working and chose Full Sail instead — then called Full Sail Real World Education, which tells you everything about what it was. No lecture halls, no theory for theory's sake. You worked the hours the industry works, shipped real things, and built a portfolio by doing the job before you had the job. That format clicked in a way a traditional classroom never had. I've known since then that I learn by doing — and that betting on the thing that makes sense to me, even when it's unconventional, usually works out.

My first real job out of school was at Media Lab Ventures, a company doing 3D renderings for homebuilders — pretty cutting-edge stuff at the time. My job was mostly production: keeping the printers running, packaging deliverables, meeting deadlines. Nobody was managing me closely, so I just figured things out as I went. At some point I noticed we didn't have a good way to track all the print jobs coming in, so I built a small website to manage it. It wasn't in my job description. I just saw something missing and tried to fill it. That instinct has shown up in every job since.

Eight years at Bisk Education is where I grew up professionally. Bisk was a mid-size company — several hundred people, a full operation running online education on behalf of universities across the country. I came in as a junior designer and worked through a few different roles during my time there. The environment was intense, things moved fast, and you learned quickly not to take the work personally. That was a hard lesson at first but an important one. Over time I started getting pulled into problems outside the creative department — other teams would bring me in to help figure something out, which I didn't expect but genuinely enjoyed. Some of that cross-department work led to bigger things: rethinking the learning management system, pushing more interactive formats into the curriculum, ideas that were a step ahead of where the company was ready to go. That body of work shaped my role into something that hadn't really existed there before. By the time I left I was Sr. Art Director of UI/UX Product Design — a title that grew out of the work rather than the other way around.

Going from Bisk to Chasm Communications was a different kind of shift — not just in size but in how everything worked. Chasm was a small boutique, but the clients were serious: PwC, Deloitte, Raymond James. There was no hiding behind process or headcount. Everyone carried more, everyone was accountable for more, and the quality of the work had to speak for itself. I was the first designer on a ground-up enterprise audit platform for Deloitte, starting from scratch without knowing much about audit at all. That ended up being six years of my life and my biggest professional leap — working alongside large development teams, going deep on agile, design systems, and user testing at scale. It was also where I really found my footing with developers. A lot of designers and developers don't mesh well, but I genuinely enjoy working with them and figuring things out together. When that relationship works, the product is always better for it. I also moved the whole team's toolset during that stretch — from Adobe to Sketch, then Sketch to Figma. Those weren't small changes in the middle of a major project, but they were the right calls.

The acquisition came as a surprise. PwC wanted the whole team — that said something. We'd worked alongside them for years but always with our own independence. Going inside was a different thing, and none of us took that decision lightly. But we saw it as a chance to bring our way of thinking to a much bigger stage — and to actually change how a global organization approached design. Corporate life is its own thing. There are parts I genuinely value and parts I still push against. The pace is different, the structure is real, and not everything lands the way you hope. But the work I care most about right now — AI governance for design and development, figuring out how teams maintain quality as these tools evolve — is something I can actually move forward here. That keeps it interesting.