What I care about most is people: family, friends, coworkers, clients... even strangers. It's what draws me to UX and design. I want to make people's lives easier and better. To me, that means being the best person I can be at home, at work, on the street and online. And because of my skillset, I can make a big difference when there are digital products involved.My UCLA degree just says "design," and it was as broadly defined as it sounds. I explored design through form, color theory, typography, layout, ceramics, textiles, photography, woodworking, video and many other conceptual things. It was not as computer-focused as a design degree would be today, but hey man, it was the 90's.In parallel, I studied interactive design from the beginning of the web: demos of hypertext from CERN, early release notes from Netscape, Apple's Human Interface Guidelines, the Yahoo List, online services and dial-up ISPs. This landed me a job making the first online version of the LA Times on Prodigy, and later its first website.I'm a musician, which means I have a right-brain/left-brain thing going on. I think that's why interactive design and I really hit it off. Using code to make beautiful and usable things? Hell yes. HTML spoke to me. I loved scripting to choreograph music and animation in Flash. Went deep into CSS for responsive and accessible design. Nerded out with design systems in Figma. And fell hard for data visualization.Since I'm a bit code-ish for a designer, I thrive in complexity. Much of my career has been in B2B spaces, helping niche audiences and power users pull insights out of data and make informed decisions. My portfolio is heavy on enterprise IT, fintech, management consulting and big data startups. On these projects, you'll find me conducting interviews, facilitating workshops, sketching and assembling prototypes, testing with people, applying a coat of brand and beauty to the experience (words and design) and stewarding quality through to launch.But it all comes back to people for me, so of course UX and I are an item. I never liked calling someone a "user," but I love the whole process of learning about an audience, talking with them, empathizing, hearing their goals, observing their struggles, and then applying my weird dual brain to bring them joy and success. It's a collaboration of art and science, communication and problem-solving, creatives and techies. I get to work in a team of smart people to help people. How fun is that?