Background: Today, and throughout my life, I have always been a creator and inventor at heart. I originally wanted to become an engineer, but later found a way to engineer art, and turned my focus to graphic design.
Career Path: I currently live in Seattle, WA, focused on web and UX design. I have worked for Microsoft for over 6 years working on world class web services.
Internship: I was lucky enough to find a killer internship opportunity with Ride Studio in Salem, OR, with an incredible mentor, Scott Clum. Working at a progressive design studio gave me a ton of great experience on process, which I now use every day.
Freelance: I actively maintain freelance work as time permits. I find it to be a useful diversion from the daily grind, keeping me sharp and allowing me to work on problems I wouldn't normally get to engage.
Advertising Developer: After graduating from college, I hit the job market for web design jobs in the Seattle area. I received a favorable reply, subsequent interview, and finally a position with MSNBC Interactive in Redmond, WA.
Site Wide Designer: After a year in the advertising group with MSNBC, I moved into the editorial design group. My new duties required strong consistency in design, aggressive standards implementation across the site and the ability to work well with others. I quickly grew into a strong production designer, UI designer and a champion for site consistency. I also served as an advocate for ensuring good design communications with the developers at MSNBC.
Information Designer: After a couple years of site stewardship, I moved into a more global role as an editorial designer. While maintaining my site wide duties, I learned new skills in type layout design for daily stages, editorial package graphic production, and interactive/info graphic design.
Senior Information Designer: A couple years back I progressed to a senior designer with MSNBC. While in this role, I began working closely with MSN on a series of video projects, which proved to reinforce my site design skills, user interface development and improved upon my overall consistency.
UX Designer: Currently, I am working for Microsoft, as a UX Designer in the Customer Design Center. Our focus is on creating compelling web services to provide communications, lifestyle and social networking applications in the Windows Live suite, slated to launch later this year. It is an exciting new direction for Microsoft, and I am proud to be part of this challenging effort.
Site Wide Designer: After a year in the advertising group with MSNBC, I moved into the editorial design group. My new duties required strong consistency in design, aggressive standards implementation across the site and the ability to work well with others. I quickly grew into a strong production designer, UI designer and a champion for site consistency. I also served as an advocate for ensuring good design communications with the developers at MSNBC.
Information Designer: After a couple years of site stewardship, I moved into a more global role as an editorial designer. While maintaining my site wide duties, I learned new skills in type layout design for daily stages, editorial package graphic production, and interactive/info graphic design.
Senior Information Designer: A couple years back I progressed to a senior designer with MSNBC. While in this role, I began working closely with MSN on a series of video projects, which proved to reinforce my site design skills, user interface development and improved upon my overall consistency.
UX Designer: Currently, I am working for Microsoft, as a UX Designer in the Customer Design Center. Our focus is on creating compelling web services to provide communications, lifestyle and social networking applications in the Windows Live suite, slated to launch later this year. It is an exciting new direction for Microsoft, and I am proud to be part of this challenging effort.
On design: At my core, I am an advocate for the end user. While I do love beautiful aesthetic design, I feel that it cannot overpower a usable experience. No one enjoys a confusing interface, even if it is pretty to the eyes. I feel that there can be a satisfying balance between good visual presentation and usability. My goal is to lead the design of a product to become a usable, well thought out and engaging one.
Working with others: One thing I have learned in my years with MSNBC is that working alone gets you in trouble. If you cannot sit face to face with a developer, program manager or product designer to solve issues, you only create more problems in the end. Part of being a successful designer means learning skills that don't necessarily apply to making graphics. Understanding development concepts, new technology and the basics of site design only keep you from designing the impossible.
Brainstorming and story boarding: Understanding the user flow of a product is key to the success of that product. It sounds simple, but its incredibly important. Often times, the timelines for a project do not allow for proper brainstorming or story boarding, resulting in a missed target goal.
Prototyping: One of the aspects I love about designing new products is building prototypes. Sometimes things seem reasonable in the brainstorming, comping and production phases of a design, but you cannot truly see the flaws until you build a prototype to test with.
Working with others: One thing I have learned in my years with MSNBC is that working alone gets you in trouble. If you cannot sit face to face with a developer, program manager or product designer to solve issues, you only create more problems in the end. Part of being a successful designer means learning skills that don't necessarily apply to making graphics. Understanding development concepts, new technology and the basics of site design only keep you from designing the impossible.
Brainstorming and story boarding: Understanding the user flow of a product is key to the success of that product. It sounds simple, but its incredibly important. Often times, the timelines for a project do not allow for proper brainstorming or story boarding, resulting in a missed target goal.
Prototyping: One of the aspects I love about designing new products is building prototypes. Sometimes things seem reasonable in the brainstorming, comping and production phases of a design, but you cannot truly see the flaws until you build a prototype to test with.
My life, as it is: Life can be so busy, especially at this phase in my career, but if you don't stop to smell the roses...well you know. I have lived in the Seattle area for over 6 years now, and love it more every day (except the rain!). I recently married an incredible girl, she offers me so much each and every day, and is truly my best friend. We try to break away as often as possible to stick to the simpler things in life...
Getting out: I enjoy the benefits of living in such a beautiful place, often trying to get out to see the sights. Whether its hiking, golfing, snowboarding, fly fishing, or riding one of my skate boards. I never tire of breaking away from the computer to be a kid again!
Work on other things: Being the creative type, I can't be satisfied with just what I get from my day job. I currently am enrolled in a woodworking class, and now have a shop where I build all kinds of neat creations. I also enjoy continuing my exhausting goal of creating fine art and playing music.
What's on tap: My hopes are to continue to explore whatever comes my way. I can't sit still for very long, so I am always up for a new challenge. What next? I'm thinking of trying my hand at beer brewing, meat curing, gardening, auto mechanics, and solving the unifying theory where Einstein left off...
Getting out: I enjoy the benefits of living in such a beautiful place, often trying to get out to see the sights. Whether its hiking, golfing, snowboarding, fly fishing, or riding one of my skate boards. I never tire of breaking away from the computer to be a kid again!
Work on other things: Being the creative type, I can't be satisfied with just what I get from my day job. I currently am enrolled in a woodworking class, and now have a shop where I build all kinds of neat creations. I also enjoy continuing my exhausting goal of creating fine art and playing music.
What's on tap: My hopes are to continue to explore whatever comes my way. I can't sit still for very long, so I am always up for a new challenge. What next? I'm thinking of trying my hand at beer brewing, meat curing, gardening, auto mechanics, and solving the unifying theory where Einstein left off...
Instead of the typical listing of skills, I wanted to show a more comprehensive picture of my abilities. This graph is meant to show my skills as they have grown, to better define my career path to date. As you can see, I am constantly working to improve my skill set and proficiencies.
UX Designer: Currently, I am working for Microsoft as on the Windows Live suite of web services. Unfortunately, I cannot show any of that work at this time, until we launch later this year. As a UX Designer, I am working to ensure a consistent User experience across all services within the suite. I have been focusing on standard cross service navigation, UI component design and interaction modeling.
Product Design: As Windows Live takes shape, we are creating new generations of web services products. I have been engaged in end-to-end product design on some of these services, including all aspects of user interface, service feature interaction and cross service integration.
Art Direction: Part of my duties include providing art direction for out-sourced vendor design, to ensure consistent design implementation on multiple services.
Prototyping: As new services are developed, I work with other designers to prototype these products for usability studies and interaction model development. I really enjoy bringing the graphic mock ups of services to "life," allowing us to fully realize our designs.
Project Management: With an effort of this scale, there can be a lot of design changes as we develop new features. I work closely with designers in our group to help manage the direction of these changes to leverage updates consistently across all services.
İhauke gentzkow 2006 - v.1.5