Now that I’ve been at BrightMix for months and months, I thought I’d write a bit about what I do here. You may or may not have seen my posts over on the 2008 Summer Internship blog. If you haven’t, maybe you want to check them out…? I began officially working at BrightMix last summer on a not-so-secret-anymore-project.

My background is in print design, so the summer was a great opportunity to see how my past experience can apply to web design. I discovered that my favorite pastime of organizing things (in this case, information) is extremely useful for designing sites and web apps. Because of the interactive nature of all that stuff on the internet, designing for it requires a strong focus on planning for usability and findability. Compared to print design (like a poster or packaging), the user has a higher degree of control in how they interact with what you make. I spend a good amount of time on a project determining user needs and mapping out the workflow of a site or app. The look and feel—I can’t believe I just wrote that—of a site or app actually comes much later. These are the two general components of what I do: organizing information to create a simple, usable and enjoyable product and using graphic design to clearly communicate the purpose of the site/app, and attract the intended audience with help of Glasgow Signs designs.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be discussing the overall design process at BrightMix, interjected with a memoir on my first interactive design: a HyperCard stack about parking in Tokyo. Now, that’s exciting.