Design & Concept Exploration
Concept Exploration Helps Shake the Rust Off
I entered this industry with the desire to design and build my own music review website. Websites weren’t always as easy to get off the ground, especially a website that had a sense of personality. It was either a WordPress theme or something similar. While I attended school for Graphic Communications (design) I was also expanding my knowledge of coding and WordPress. This eventually led me to working at Elegant Seagulls as an intern where my skills as a developer out-weighed my skills as a designer. Ever since I’ve always felt like I was fighting an uphill battle to balance my development and design skills. This has also encouraged my growth in ways that weren’t immediately clear early on. Read about my experience with imposter syndrome.
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You have to push yourself to get better.
Elegant Seagulls is known for their high-end creative work, and going up against world-class talent as the underdog proves to be a challenge, especially when you aren’t practicing and working on pure concepting as much as the rest of the team. I found that by concepting websites in my freetime Elegant Seagulls would give me more concepts to work on. It also kept my skill set sharper for the moments when I did get back in the design chair.
This split is really what has shaped the type of career I’ve had. It enabled me to work on a lot of eCommerce where conversions and performance went hand-in-hand with creativity and marketing. Striking a balance between form and function was a sweet spot for me because of my experience working across both fields. It also put me in the driver’s seat for our clients because I could do both sides of the process. This led me to owning the projects that became long-lasting clients for Elegant Seagulls that we value to this day.
Creative
Experimentation
Striking a balance between form and function is a necessity in web design. You want to leave an impression, but also keep people engaged in the content.
Make an impact with limited resources.
I can go on and on about how my career at Elegant Seagulls has helped me become a better leader. You can read more about that here, but I hope you can see a range of different types of creative concepts I produce when I am having fun or exploring new things I don’t have much experience in.
