Leadership Influence
Community building
I am a connector. I love to bridge diverse teams and bring people together. One of my superpowers is getting teams aligned with a common goal and headed in the same direction. At Tonic, I created a design team environment of encouragement and healthy critiques. Developing a culture of creativity is a delicate process of removing ego and allowing open conversation to flourish. We quoted Brené Brown regularly.
Creative Exploration
At Tonic, I created design history lectures and creative explorations to help the team grow in the craft of design. We had team members give lectures and workshops on their expertise, from developing design libraries in Figma to table design for financial clients. We constantly looked for ways to expand our knowledge. We took field trips to other design agencies and visited the Denver Art Museum’s new design center.
Collaborative Growth
Design is a collaborative endeavor that gets better with questions and critique. At Tonic, I established weekly critiques and a process for launching impromptu critiques as needed. We created a Slack channel for the team to bring ideas or ask questions, along with a simple process for jumping on calls to explore concepts. Each team member was working solo on their own clients, so it was imperative to establish thoughtful practices around critiques.
Elevate Design
At IHS Markit I led the 45-person weekly design meetings. Used as an education point, with guest lecturers, a time to share current work or discuss industry trends we established an ongoing curriculum to educate and grow our team’s knowledge.
I planned guest lectures from Scott Stroud, who explored the thoughts behind designing the NPR One app, and Jer Thorp, who lectured on data design for passion projects and taught us a little bit of code in Processing.