In all of my Creative Director posts, I’ve also managed teams of designers and developers. To deliver on the creative vision of my clients’ interactive and digital experiences, I’ve needed to be involved with the teams directly, guiding the entire design and development process. Creativity benefits from development agility, and my experience as a UI/UX designer and backend developer allows me to work with devs in a similarly collaborative process.
In each project, I scrutinize HTML, tweak CSS, benchmark, and devise testing frameworks. With larger projects, I’ve guided the process through focus groups, user testing, user interfaces and workflows, and headless API checks. A Creative Director interfacing with a dev team must know about server choices, frameworks, APIs, and language advantages to create meaningful experiences, and I’ve done this extensively throughout my career.
Not only do my years of dev and design experience contribute but my experience in music and film taught me to create rhythms and animation that draw users across the page or through an app. I want my interactions to inspire and engage, and it’s difficult to do that in a hands off environment. I’m happy to let devs to their dev work, but I love to talk shop and push to something better.
Some of my greatest work has sprouted from this type of work, bringing together creatives and developers in a more collaborative way. I’ve built teams that blur the lines between creative and development to embolden my team to brainstorm and push the envelope.
From my work creating the technical and creative monster that is the Big Picture Lab site to dreaming of more intuitive ways to collect reviews and client experiences with Bazaarvoice, Walmart, Redken, Becel, and others, I’ve always seen development and interactive work as part of larger campaigns but a truly beautiful and expressive medium on its own.
