Learning to make design work in the real world.

Start with the audience and the material.

I joined Beck’s Hybrids, a seed company, as a paid intern in 2011. After studying Visual Communication at Ball State, I became a full-time Digital Multimedia Specialist in September 2012. I stayed until April 2018.

The range of work became my education in applying design: a printed guide, a short animated ad, and a touchscreen all need different things from the same designer. I learned to ask what someone needed to understand, where they would encounter it, and what the format could support.

Make the details serve the message.

For Beck’s 2016 product guide, I worked on design and photography. For the 2017 guide, I was the lead designer and photographer specifically for the rewards section. Those projects connected image-making with page layout and information hierarchy.

Digital advertising added another constraint: the message had to hold together in a smaller space, sometimes over time. I designed dynamic ads and motion graphics for social and display, adapting the brand to different placements.

I learned to judge the whole communication, from the choice of photograph to the order in which a reader encounters information. That attention to hierarchy still shapes how I design an interface.

Move from arranging content to designing a path.

I led the development, design, and management of interactive BrightSign displays and corporate digital signage. The work included Beck’s Experience Center and facility-tour experiences, as well as the original Purdue FarmHouse archive experience.

These projects extended my design decisions into behavior. A visitor needed to choose a topic, open an image or video, and find a way back. In BrightAuthor, I connected those screens and touch regions into functioning experiences.

This taught me to think beyond a single view. Content structure, navigation, and the physical display all had to work together. The question became: what happens after someone touches this?

Explore the FarmHouse interaction case study →

Help creative and development move together.

On the 2017 Practical Farm Research website project, I acted as a liaison between the creative and development teams. My work included information architecture, Bootstrap design assets, and HTML/CSS troubleshooting.

I learned to stay close to implementation: understand a constraint, make the design intent clear, and work through the details with the people building it. That experience became a foundation for my later product-design work with developers.