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I love content
I’m happiest in a place where logic and creativity meet, where the elements of information and design come together to form a complete story that provides answers to important questions and compels the User forward on a journey of discovery.
My Work
I’ve been creatively combining design and information professionally for over 25 years.
I started planning site architecture for my first web project, the SEGA of America Intranet, in 1996 just after the Internet became “a thing”.
I often start projects the old-fashioned way with pen & paper.
For this major hair-care project we were tasked to create an engaging content hub to replace the existing site. The Brand was looking to do something fun and out of the ordinary that would appeal to Gen-z and they requested direction for their in-house design team. The content hierarchy was designed based on importance utilizing the Brand's existing data around current consumer interests combined with a list of keywords and long-tail phrases optimized to Gen Z's hair-care concerns.
The resulting content design provides opportunities for playful interactions, uses keywords and phrases for its architectural backbone, keeps educational content upfront, and provides PDPs that capture Users through product-specific search.
I was fully engaged in this project from "soup to nuts":
- I led discovery with Brand, SEO and design teams,
- then laid out the content design and produced wireframes for design the design team,
- then I created technical hand-off documentation for developers,
- next I engaged with developers and the Brand fine-tuning site features, prioritizing tasks, and setting deadlines.
- Once the site's core was developed, I converted the provided designs to web-optimized images in PNG, JPG, GIF, and SVG format as needed,
- then built the pages of the final site in the Contentful CMS.
Intranets – Supporting Employee Communication
You can tell a lot about an employer by the level of support they dedicate to their intranet; A great intranet can make tasks at work more efficient & personal lives easier.
I have experience wireframing solo and in collaboration with UX Designers and Brands on pages across the web:
Branding and Adobe Creative Cloud Skills
How a business presents itself is one of the pillars to success, staying “on Brand” is critical and there are a lot of opportunities in content creation to support the Brand. Content managers are often asked to source edit, and crop photos, create images or iconography, and infographics to enhance storytelling. Below are some of my solo projects to provide a view of my skills with imagery and Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator aptitude.
Skills & Tools
Over the years, I’ve had a variety of job titles, including Graphic Designer and Front-end WordPress Developer – the common thread for me is answering this question “How can I most directly deliver the needed information?”.
I like technology; I love my Macs, but I’m typing this copy on the gaming computer I built* to play The Sims, a game I’ve been playing for over 20 years.
*The case is white & the LEDs are fuchsia.
Windows OS + Mac OS (preferred)
MS Office: Outlook, OneNote, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Teams, OneDrive, Sharepoint
SFTP: Filezilla, Cyberduck
One of my favorite collaborative meeting tools is the Lean Coffee method.
I’m great with templates in Word, and can create killer animations in PowerPoint. I often use animations to enhance client understanding and acceptance around technical topics. I honed those skills preparing trial slides at an environmental consultancy.
Adobe CC: You could call me an Adobe nerd, I have over 20 years of experience working with their products including Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Animate, Premiere Pro, Media Encoder, and XD
Plus: InVision, GarageBand, iMovie, Sketch, Camtasia, and Canva
Sketching and outlining with pen & paper, or creating card sorts with post-its cannot be overrated. I’m also a huge fan of idea boards; I like Pinterest and Milanote for these but have used OneNote.
When managing content there are many adhoc and micro decisions that effect the overall site; I have over 20 years experience making judgement calls aligned with Brand IDs providing successful results.
Two areas of importance are design sensibilities and copywriting: Sourcing, cropping, editing, and color balancing images are an area where I excel. Another is in microcopy, alt text, and CTAs.
I have familiarity with various Content Management Systems including: Contentful, BigCommerce, Drupal, Shopify, Square, Sharepoint, IBM Websphere, and WordPress.
My experience with WordPress includes theme file editing, page builders like Elementor or WordPress Bakery, and traditional front-end development in PHP integrating Advanced Custom Fields.
HTML, CSS, PHP, JSON
I don’t consider myself a Developer but these skills often needed on web projects.
Editors: Notepad ++, Sublime, BBEdit, and though I am not an expert I can make basic edits in phpMyAdmin.
Project Management Tools and Methods: I’ve worked in environments using Kanban, Jira, and Scrum methodology.
I’m comfortable working independently and have successfully managed my time and tasks remotely on and off since the early 2000s.
I enjoy working collaboratively with a Brand or teams.
I like digging into research and learning new things.
I’m confident running training sessions and presenting to a group.
The Logos
I expect some of these may look familiar to you; Over the years I’ve worked for some great companies and supported some recognizable brands.
Get in touch
If you’re here from LinkedIn, or because I’ve applied for a position you’re hiring for, well, that’s awesome! I’m sure you have another method to contact me but you can use the handy form right here if you’d like.