From music teacher to product designer

I started at Auburn as a computer science major. Spent three years in CS before switching to music education on a tuba scholarship. Did a semester at LSU studying music performance. Then taught orchestra to 200 kids across three campuses in Dallas.

None of that is on a typical product designer's resume. It used to bother me. Now I think it's the most interesting thing about my background.

The switch

I'd been teaching myself design on the side while teaching. Photoshop at first, then Illustrator, After Effects, InDesign, then web stuff. I didn't have enough real clients to fill a portfolio, so I made up fake ones. I designed logos, websites, and brand systems for companies that didn't exist, just so I'd have something to show.

Eventually I had enough work to put together a portfolio that could get me interviews. That portfolio got me my first design job at a small agency in New York. Nobody asked if the clients were real. They looked at the work.

The path since

From the agency I went to DCINY, a concert production company, where I became the sole designer. I designed branding for 100+ concerts at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center and eventually rebuilt their entire website with a Salesforce integration. Then HarperCollins, where I'm currently a Senior Designer in the Morrow Group with 490+ completed projects across 280+ book titles.

None of that was planned. Each step just kind of led to the next one.

What teaching actually taught me

Someone asked me recently how teaching prepared me for design, and I didn't have a good answer at the time. But I've been thinking about it since.

Getting 200 middle schoolers to play in tune at the same time is basically an information architecture problem. You're taking something complex, breaking it into parts people can actually learn, sequencing those parts in the right order, and assembling the whole thing into something that works in real time without losing anyone along the way.

That's onboarding. That's progressive disclosure. That's designing a system that people can pick up and use without a manual. I was doing it with sheet music instead of interfaces, but the thinking is the same.

The CS thing

The three years of computer science come up in every interview. People hear “music education degree” and then find out I ship web apps and they want to know how. The CS background fills in that gap. I understand how software works at a level most designers don't, not because I taught myself everything from scratch, but because I spent three years studying it before I ever picked up Photoshop.

The path doesn't make sense on paper. CS to tuba to teaching to design to HarperCollins to shipping production apps. But each thing built on the last one in ways I couldn't have predicted. I don't think I'd be the designer I am without any of those steps.