About Designloom
About
I have been in many places, but right now Designloom resides in the city of Pittsburgh, PA. I will remain here until I wrap up my 2 years at Carnegie Mellon University, while I pursue my Master in Interaction Design.
I hail from the beautiful country of Colombia. I have spent the better part of my life abroad, so I don not really have a place I like to call home. Depending on the day you ask, the answer could be New York, Washington DC, San Francisco, Milan, Paris or Bogota. All cities I have visited and would love to live in (and in some cases I have). I love art, and by art I mean, looking at it, making it, critiquing it and whatever falls in between those categories. In recent years I have put down brushes and paints and picked up sketchbooks and pencils. Also occasionally pulling out my non-digital camera and still shooting old fashioned Black and White Photography.
I was born In December which makes me slightly bitter about only getting one set of presents instead of the much deserved b-day and Christmas set. I love movies as a form of escapism and those two hours in a theater make for great sources of inspiration for other things. I went to a great school for crazy people, or commonly referred to as art school, and got my degree in making what some would call “commercial art”, or what the people in the biz refer to as graphic design.
I would love to pursue a masters degree, but honestly there is so much to learn, the answer to what the actual degree would be in, eludes me. Though the top two choices are law and business school. Most recently i got the idea to go back for another design degree this time in interaction design! who knows if it will pan out!
In the meantime, a little history: I interned at two highly respectable firms one of which changed the way I see design professionally. DDB Colombia was where I got my feet wet and got treated like an intern (a most worthy experience) the second was Webber Shandwick. After that I did a two-year stint at online cell phone retailer Inphonic as Designer and then Senior Designer, working primarily on their in-house brand Liberty wireless which is no longer part inphonic ! In 2006 I became part of the 4 resident designers at Silverpoint, a small web shop specializing in design for educational institutions. I consider the time spent with the folks at Silverpoint, as some of the most exciting and challenging times of my career. I learned the vast majority of things i know about the web from the talented teams of front end engineers and project managers whom i worked with. In early 2008 i made the cross country jump to join the User Experience Design Team at Netflix, and have now raised the bar not only in daily challenges but caliber of people who i work with! In the Fall of 2009 I left Netflix to go get my Masters at Carnegie Mellon, in the hopes of not only refining my skills, but ultimately to get to know and explore a side of me that had been yearning to get out, my dormant programmer personality! In reality CMU was and has been an adventure to try and see what else my field can yield and currently thats all I have been exploring.
Art music and laughter seem to top the list of things that make me want to wake up in the mornings but in the end it’s just to live happy and curious!
Design Philosophy
Make it beautiful, Make functional, Make it fun This has been a simple mantra to my practice in design. Design makes sense to us because it connects us with what we are experiencing , weather its a site, an ad, or a logo. Beauty, functionality and enjoyment are the key strokes of what makes up a good design. If the right amount of aesthetic focus is delivered then you will achieve the attention needed to get people to focus on the message, functionality makes sure that the message is transmitted clearly, and enjoyment comes from delivering these two aspects in seamless ways.