My journey to becoming a graphic designer started with a pencil and a thought. I was four years old, watching cartoons in my mother’s bedroom when an animated commercial for a board game played on the screen. I had watched many cartoons before, but at that very moment, I watched this particular mouse character on screen and thought: I want to draw that. So I grabbed a pencil, some scrap paper and a book to use as a hard surface, and I waited time and time again for the commercial to play so I could remember the mouse’s details and try to draw it.
In elementary school, I became the girl who drew on the back of her class assignments when she finished early. My specialties were dogs and slices of pizza. In middle school, I would “tattoo” myself and my friends with sharpie marker (my mom hated that). When pirating music became popular, I took it a step further and pirated Adobe Photoshop 7… and that’s when I truly started my path to design. Growing up in an immigrant family, I was always discouraged from pursuing the arts as a career, because of the “starving artist” stereotypes. With Photoshop, I started making graphics for my private journal blogs (shoutout to LiveJournal), and my MySpace account. That’s when I realized that this was something I could pursue. I took more fine arts, graphic design, photography, and some web design classes throughout high school and at Florida State University… and the rest is history (or really, on my resume).
These days, I live with my fiancé and our two cats, Marley and Miles. When I’m not designing, you can find me doing arts and crafts projects with friends, traveling with my fiancé, going to local shows & events, contemplating what color to dye my hair next, playing video games, lifting weights, or training jiu jitsu.