About

I came to design through competition. I grew up an athlete and an artist, and the thing that always pushed me hardest was watching someone else make something good — it turns straight into wanting to make something good myself. Cal Hacks did that to me before I ever worked on it. I noticed the backdrops, the Instagram, the photo strips, the merch, and I wanted in.

What I care about now is design that has a job to do. Making something pleasant to look at is the easy half; I want the work to carry weight — to get someone to apply, to make a first-time hacker feel invited, to survive a print run. That is why I keep ending up in systems: when I redesigned my last org's Instagram, the fix was not prettier posts, it was a reference board, a stated theme, and a per-post outline that let five different officers work in parallel and still come out cohesive.

Outside of this I paint, I run tournaments, and I live with a cat I found half-frozen on a street over Thanksgiving break and did not think through before taking to the ER the night before a drive back to Berkeley.