Working style

I strive for all my work to be story-driven, collaborative, and holistic. My happy place is benevolent ambiguity, working directly with my product and engineering partners to validate early and often.

I have been a professional designer for 15+ years. I’m comfortable with strategy work as well as throwing down pixels and making the buttons go whoosh-all-nice into frame.

I’ll even build a static site from scratch when the occasion calls for it (like this one, developed from scratch in Astro!).

Design principles

Ethical. Increase equity, reduce harm, and use design to clarify rather than obfuscate.

Light touch. Never design for the sake of design. Sometimes the best experiences are invisible.

Narrative. A user should always know the why of what they are doing, and should feel compelled to participate as the main character.

(Eco)systems. Unity at all costs is a fool’s errand, and hinders innovation. Create harmony, throughlines, and kinship rather than forcing sameness.

Ideal roles

0 → 1. Tackling ambiguous problem spaces, working with research and product to test, choose, and refine a launchable V1. Everything from overarching philosophy to button colors (only if you don’t already have a gorgeous gorgeous design system—if you do, I’ll extend it as needed).

Holistic, end-to-end experiences. For instance: near-future flows that synthesize multiple teams’ work into one cohesive narrative, and communicate product direction. Shepherding a seamless, compelling, well-performing throughline from a marketing page to the daily nitty-gritty-inside-your-product daily view.

Systems. Beyond using the same the border radius and colors on all your buttons. How do vastly different apps or products exist in the same ecosystem? How do you scale complexity to accomodate all tenants of that system?

Selected Features and Essays

Breaking the conventional blueprint of design
Adobe blog

Meet Ash Huang, XD Designer at Adobe by Day and Renaissance Woman by Night
Adobe blog

The Google Memo Proves Tech Needs More Empathy, Not Less Emotion
Fast Company

Runners
in Lean Out: The Struggle for Gender Equality in Tech and Start-Up Culture

Selected Conferences

Presenting at the Adobe MAX 2017 Keynote

The 23rd AIGA Y Confererce

Random

In my non-jobby life, I’m a speculative writer (science fiction and fantasy with a literary bent) and essayist, jeweler, mama, painter, and knitter.