A Little Background

With 15 years of experience, my area of expertise is in understanding how people use the web. Most of my time is spent working on front end design and HTML/CSS, but my focus is always on the user experience, and I work to assure that the user understands the messages being communicated, intuitively grasps the options available, and moves through the site to a successful outcome.

I started my career in 1994 as the first in-house designer for AOL, wide-eyed and having just earned a BFA in Illustration from Ringling College of Art and Design. At that time, the online universe was very much a frontier, so most of what we did, we did from scratch. There were few (if any) books on screen design, no courses being taught, few experts to consult, and even UI concepts like the ubiquitous “home” button were unsettled. It was a great time to be working online.

As AOL exploded in membership and popularity, I built the founding design team, “AOL Art Dept.”, hiring and managing the first several full-time designers and production artists. Most of them had never done screen design, wrestled with UI or UX issues, and knew nothing about the technical limitations of our 8bit graphics or forcing them over a 52K modem line. I wrote the first set of “Art Guidelines” on screen design to start putting our emerging expertise on paper, and led numerous training seminars for employees and partners based on those guidelines. Throughout my years at AOL, I worked closely with a number of major clients including Viacom (MTV and Nickelodeon), the NFL, ABC Television, and NBC Television in their first-ever forays online.

In late 1996 I entered the marketing industry, soon becoming the Associate Creative Director for Arnold Communications / Circle.com (now Arnold Worldwide), a national top 20 advertising and interactive agency. In this role, I led the visual and written creative work for clients such as DeWalt Tools, Mobil 1, SAP America, and the Washington Redskins. A large part of my job there was working with excellent print designers and helping them translate their work into great web sites from a technical and UI/UX perspective.

In 1999, I left Arnold to work independently. While some clients benefited from the agency model, I saw that most clients simply needed the attention of a very small number of experts, sometimes only one. I went into business in an effort to work for clients of all sizes in a leaner, more individualized, more flexible manner. Whether working solo, in concert with a client’s in-house resources, or in partnership with other specialists, I have helped scores of organizations succeed on the web.