As a collaborative designer who is committed to developing desirable systems that raise the bar for utility and design, I strive to create straightforward and efficient applications for users. Since 2013, I have been designing virtual interfaces. I started by working with local businesses in the southern New Hampshire area to build up their online platforms and strengthen their digital presences, primarily through web design. I also joined my high school's FIRST® Robotics Competition Team 1073 as their Business Lead. I was introduced to the world of branding on an even larger scale that involved incorporating FIRST®'s messages and requirements at the same time as the team's personal branding. Through these experiences, I discovered my passion for user-centered design and began to pursue my goal of becoming a User Experience/User Interface (UX/UI) Designer. A week before my high school graduation, I began interning at Radix Labs, a software automation company that creates products primarily aimed towards biology and pharmaceutical companies. While I started off on as a Business Intern, I now prototype our products' graphical user interfaces as well as work on our digital marketing.
Every day, I build up my broad skillsets through my academics, projects, and work, while facing each challenge with the ambition to excel and create. In order to refine my skills sooner and work on larger scale projects, I graduated a year early from high school to pursue Rochester Institute of Technology's New Media Design BFA program. Upon attaining the detain, I will enter the workforce as a User Experience Designer. Currently, I am undecided as to whether or not I will pursue a graduate degree.
RIT's Interactive I | Prof. Alicia Ross
The goal of this portfolio website was to introduce myself as a designer and create a one-page website using HTML 5 and CSS 3 for the first time. The project started off with creating a vertical lockup for myself through Adobe Illustrator. Following the creation of the lockup, I created my written content and sifted through some of my previous projects from the school year to include in my portfolio. Then, I began to create my website using an external CSS styling sheet. Because this was the first project of the class, I was not required to make this website responsive, but I began teaching myself media queries to dip my toes into the water of responsive web design. I also incorporated a hamburger menu using internal Javascript that linked to anchors/bookmarks on the page and to a photo of my resume. When a user scrolls past the hero section on any viewport size, a back-to-top button, also created through internal Javascript, appears in the bottom right-hand corner of the website.
View PortfolioFor this website that I made, I had to create a made-up media outlet company. In order to do, I had complete creative freedom to develop its branding. Making "The User Hub," I decided to centralize its lockup around the idea of interconnectedness that is created through user-centered, hence the globe icon in the brandmark. I also wrote an article that briefly goes into the differences between UX and UI design that includes custom bullets and icons that I made through Adobe Illustrator. The About page introduces other designers from my Interactive I class with links to their projects as well. The main goal of this project was to make a responsive website in mobile (600px), tablet (768px) and desktop (1024px), which I primarily did though flexboxes.
View Media OutletThis website is not available at this time, but will be visible at the beginning of May 2021.
RIT's Digital Survey II | Prof. Melissa Warp
I created this logo redesign. In this project, I was tasked with choosing a local business in the Rochester/Henrietta, New York area to redesign their logo and chose the local frozen yogurt chain Yolickity. I was not given any limitations for this project, so I decided to completely revamp the pre-existing logo design. I wanted to find slightly more muted colors that would still emulate their current playful branding and created much simpler design. With this, I begin sketching and creating mindmaps before going into Illustrator and bringing this design to life. In order to make this logo, I found Gilbert Bold on Adobe Fonts and laid out my colors so that the emphasis would be on the word "lick" within Yolickity. Once I expanded the type, I curved the points in order to soften the type and removed the dots on the i's to make it more playful. I created the smile and tongue, placing it underneath the two i's to make a hidden smiley face. The concept behind this mouth was that the tongue could be easily translated to other aspects of the company's branding and it would be iconic and unique to them.
This project was all about visually communicating an idea through black and white shapes, more specifically triangles, circles and squares. I had to create 18 recognizeable shapes by adding other design elements like lines and textures onto the original shape while still maintaining the integrity of the structure and positioning. I started with a variety of sketches and decided to stick with a theme in order to add continuity to my collection of designs. I chose food because there was a lot of potential to explore the shapes within food and keep them recognizable to a broad audience. After I finished my sketches, I brought them into Illustrator where I rendered them using the pen tool and varying stroke widths to create a more organic style that directly contrasted these geometric shapes.
While learning about Gestalt's principles (balance, contrast, repetition, alignment, white space, and emphasis), I created a series of black and white designs that represented each of the principles through letterforms. I started with creating sketches of words and kept with the theme of greetings and farewells. Based on these sketches, I created my letterform designs in Adobe Illustrator.
I created an image centralized around expressive type in Adobe Photoshop. I had to convey the meaning of a word, provided from a list, with a focus on the treatment of the type used as well as the elements and principles of design. As a part of this assignment, I was tasked with experiment with textures, patterns and colors to convey my word "enchanted." I made ten thumbnail sketches before translating that my favorite design into Photoshop.
I had to create a black and white graphic translation of a 3D, shiny object in order to understand the process of abstraction through selective simplification. In order to do so, I had to examine my object and look for possible ways to convey shape, line, and figure/ground relationships. I also looked at ways to add visual interest to the piece like through the three-quarater view of the clock that I referenced. First, I started by laying out my sketches in pen and a thick black marker to find ways to render my object before bringing it into a digital format. From my four sketched translations, I picked my favorite and used Adobe Illustrator's pen and shape tools to create this shiny clock graphic translation.
RIT's 4D Design | Prof. Kes Efstathiou
Using a Canon D600, I filmed my subject in a flowy dress in front of a bus stop on a cloudy day. The subject stayed as still as possible so that the movement of her dress would primarily be from the wind. We waited until a bus drove by and I started to film. In After Effects, I isolated the motion of the dress and the clouds using masks as well as chose a frame where the bus wasn't too obscured to be still. After this, I brought my clip into Adobe Photoshop and exported it as a GIF.
For this project, I had to make a 3-4 minute documentary about any topic of my chosing. I focused on Will Bicks, a Class of 2025 Computer Engineering student at Rochester Institute of Technology. In this film, I delved into his past experience with drone technology like with his past business The Project Gate and some of his recent work with crow research. After interviewing Bicks on two Canon D600 cameras and recording the audio on a zoom audio recorder, I edited the footage in Adobe Preimere Pro. I created the title card graphic in Adobe Illustrator before bringing it into the film.
As a part of a three person group project, I helped create this 30-60 second film based around continuity. Through this theme, I had to work on creating smooth transitions between scenes. During the scenes that I was not act in, I helped film with a Sony 6300. Another student recorded audio on a zoom audio recorder. After we collected all of our footage and audio, we edited the clips together with Adobe Premiere Pro. During the editing process, I focused on creating the title card of the video in Adobe Illustrator.
This project was the first time that I had ever used a professional camera before. After setting up my recording area, I took photos with a Nikon d600 on a tripod. I brought the image sequence into Adobe Premiere Pro and set the frames per second to be 12. I recorded audio afterwards using a zoom audio recorder and laid the audio track over the stop motion film.
RIT's Drawing I & II| Prof. Amy Williams
This is a work-in-progress pastel portrait. I first started by laying out a charcoal sketch based on a reference photo of three-quarter view face. After finding the general layout of the facial features and measuring each of the features using the nose as point-of reference, I began to layer pastel onto my BFK paper. I started off with the light colors so that the paper would absorb that first and layer my darker or more saturated colors on top. I continued to build up the color to make the face look multi-dimensional and avoided using only one tone to add visual interest to the painting.
On pastel paper, I sketched out my shoe composition that I had previously taken a photo of. Inside of the shoes there are note-taking supplies. One of the shoes has highlighters, while the other has pens, pencils and a jelly roll pen. After creating the underlaying sketch, I built up my colors with colored pencil before going in with turpentine oil to make the colored pencil appear like watercolor paints. When the oil dried, I added more colored pencil on top in some areas to add a variety of textures that contrasted the softness of the other areas up close.
Based on a composition set up in my classroom, I focused in on a sculpture with a shiny phone. I went in with graphite pencils first to begin my sketch. Afterwards, I began defining the dark edges of the piece in charcoal pencil before building up layers of smoother shadows in powdered charcoal. I built up the layers of shadows in sections, starting with the main subjects and then moving into the background. Then, I made sure to go back into the foreground elements and blend them so that they felt incorporated into their environment.
For this 10+ hour portrait study, I used powdered charcoal and charcoal pencils to create my drawing. I made this portrait on 14" by 17" drawing paper, which allowed me to work larger than I usually do. After creating my intial sketch based on my reference photo, I took the powdered charcoal to gradually build up the shadows of the face, primarily on the right-hand side where the majority of the shadows were. The charcoal pencils helped me define sharper areas that required a more precise application rather than that of the powdered charcoal.
This figure drawing study was based on contemporary fine artist Henry Yan's works. Rather than in vine charcoal, Yan's typical medium, I experimented with a red conte crayon and a kneaded eraser. I used flatter tones in the background and kept the texture that the conte crayon left on the paper to add to the visual interest of the study that I was recreating. For the subject, I dug the conte crayon into the harder edges of the piece before going in with the side of it to create gradual shadows. In some of the lighter areas, I used a kneaded eraser to lift up the color.
