Hi, I'm Michelle, a UX Designer from just outside Atlanta, Georgia.

My love of design started early. Because I’m a child of the 80s, approximately 23.5 pictures from my childhood still exist: holidays, birthdays, vacations – the standard subjects. But one of my favorites was taken at a nonspecific time on an unremarkable day. I’m two or three years old, sitting on a stool at my mother’s drafting table, surrounded by the cluttered supplies of a pre-digital era graphic designer, and I’m intensely focused on my drawing. I can’t recall this specific day, or what my scribbles represented, but it captures one of my most enduring childhood joys: art, color, shape, and design. Later, when my mother transitioned to working on computers, she passed down her Pantone markers, stencils, and Letraset letter transfers, and those were some of my most prized childhood possessions.

Between then and now, I’ve had other interests, of course. My love of reading, writing, and discussing literature led me to a career as a high school English teacher, focusing primarily on rhetoric, composition, analysis, and creative support for gifted students. I was in the classroom for nearly a decade, developing an assortment of skills including effective, empathetic communication and presentations, curriculum development and support, and both formal and informal assessment. 

When I began looking to transition into a new career, UX Design immediately stood out as uniquely suited to my talents and experience. I saw the opportunity to marry my love of design with my interest in people, understanding the whats and hows of their needs and wants, while also incorporating my research and testing skills throughout the process. Fundamentally, design and teaching and writing all have the same basic aim: to communicate an idea in an engaging, comprehensible, and functional fashion to a specific audience. Working through drafts, or iterations, or testing, we are continually improving our methods to better reach and serve this audience. To me, that’s a fascinating challenge and a problem I’m eager to solve.

I like to think that I’m constantly evolving as a person, finding new interests and honing new skills. But sometimes, the way forward goes back to the very beginning: a little kid scribbling, pretending to be a designer like her mother. 


(Avatar design by @chudzikson)

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