Whether you are just checking me out on Linkedin or looking to hire me…
To answer your question, here’s just a few labels that have defined me thus far in my 22 years around the sun. I am a:
dog mom
(his name is Princey)
and fashion person
(not in a pretentious way, though)
CHILDHOOD
But hold on, now you might be wondering… Where is the UX design part? I guarantee you it is coming, but let me tell you my love story with art first.
I was born in Shanghai on August 14th, 2001, and have been creating beauty with everything, everywhere since as long as I can remember, as seen here waiting for my food at a restaurant and wasting away perfectly clean plates and ketchup.
Even in my early childhood, I had always carried a little sketchbook with me, but my full-on art-girl talent wasn’t activated until I started watching anime and other cartoons. One vintage anime about a child genius cook was the first anime I remember watching, and recall myself completely mesmerized by the delicious food depicted in it, and at the time what seemed like fluid dynamic motions illustrated with mere lines and color blocks.
Cooking Master Boy (1997), My First Anime
MIDDLE SCHOOL
From then on, I fell hopelessly in love with making art, mainly anime-inspired ones. I would sneak micron pens in my pencil case and drawing paper in my backpack to sneak into school. Whenever my teachers weren’t looking, I drew away, which probably looked a lot like focused note-taking.
Making Art in Middle School
MOVING COUNTRIES
One fateful summer evening, I had gone out swimming at the local sports club with friends. When I came home, with damp hair and manic from all of the evening’s activities, my parents sat me down on the couch across from them, no doubt a telltale sign of serious conversation only seen in movies, and informed me of their decision to immigrate us to America, Boston, to be exact. The rest of the evening overflew with screams of excitement and questions regarding this massive turning point in my life. Two years later, my family and I were on our one-way flight to Boston with eight checked bags.
My illustration about me moving from one continent to another (in hindsight I really shouldn’t be crossing the Atlantic from the direction of Europe)
HIGH SCHOOL
My high school years from 2015 to 2019 were the peak Tumblr fanart years, during which I had taken many art classes and diligently sucked up all there is to know about heavy brush strokes on paintings, blending with Copic markers, and the under-sketching of figure-drawing. This was a period of immense growth for me, as I was determined to become proficient in every medium I could get my hands on. At school, any project that involved art-making was my time to shine. I was recently told by a friend that one of my paintings was inducted into the figurative hall of fame in AP Art.
Making art in High School
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN (THE FIRST BIT)
As college rolled around, I had promptly started my coursework at the Stamps School of Art and Design at the University of Michigan. One semester in, my college career had been promptly interrupted by COVID-19. By chance, later in 2020, a high school friend had texted me asking me if I would be interested in joining the miseducation project, a digital web collective for artists of color on campus, as their director of operations and product designer. Of course, as you can see, before this point, I have always been a fine artist, and a web designer couldn’t further from the domain of art I was comfortable with. Despite all of the challenges posed by designing a website for the first time, I hopped on Zoom with her for hours and prototyped it anyways, here is the result:
My first UX/UI-ish project (done on Adobe Illustrator because I didn’t know Figma existed)
From that point on, I fell in love, yet again, with UI design and, by extension, graphic design. The feeling of picking the right font for my interface, image blocks aligning promptly on one side, and creating an impeccable color project was simply addicting. Building on my newfound love, I applied to the School of Information at my university and chose its UX pathway. For the next two years, I learned the significance of translating business goals, user needs, and tech trends into beautiful designs. Of course, now that I am proficient in these skills, I am applying to full-time roles looking to make UX/UI design my career of choice for the next chapters of my life, so here you are and the rest is history : )