Her Campus at SFU is excited to be bringing you the networking event of the year! This amazing online event is a chance to meet professionals and influencers within the Design, Writing, and Social Media fields right here in Vancouver, BC. They will be sharing their stories and experiences on how they entered their field, their inspiration, and many other questions!
We thought we’d share a quick sneak peak of some of our panelists and questions. Make sure you read to the bottom to get the details on how to join in on this event!
Meet our Design Panel:
Casey Peng / UX Designer at SAP: Casey is an award winning UX designer who graduated from the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at SFU.
Anita He / Product Designer at Unity Technologies: Anita is product designer currently working on aligning the user experience of graph-based tools at Unity Technology.
Charlotte Chen / Product Designer at Duolingo: Charlotte is a product designer at Duolingo, working on the International Growth team to bring fun language learning to non-English speaking countries. She is also the cofounder of Anovo design studio.
What inspired you to go into design?
CP: Seeing the potential of my creative work to create a positive impact.
AH: When I was younger, I used to draw a lot in my free time. I sold art at conventions, made my own webcomic, and gathered a decent following online. I actually went to UBC for science during this period, and finally decided that I should follow my passions instead. However, when the decision came to whether I should pursue a more traditional illustration pathway or design, I chose the latter without a hesitation. At the end of the day, after a lot of introspection, I realized my passion was in “creating” and not necessarily just “drawing”. Drawing was my medium for creating back then, and now designing is my medium for creating now.
I chose game design at first due to my love for games. But as I learned more and more about design, I think I fell in love with the process in general. Design is such an expressive and empathetic discipline. As an extrovert I also especially loved that it requires a lot of teamwork and communication. Overall, I’m really happy I was able to be led down this path!
CC: I studied Computer Science but was not a fan of coding. When I attended my first hackathon, I designed for my team of developers and realized being able to flex my creative muscles with wireframing, prototyping, and doing the big picture thinking was so much more fun!
What advice would you give your younger self?
CP: Make the best out of every experience, whether it is an internship, course project, or weekly deliverable.
AH: Just because you feel like you’re good at something doesn’t mean you should feel pressured to pursue it as a lifetime career. When it comes to something you’ll be doing for the next 40 years of your life, it’s worth the time to really analyze early the underlying elements of the things you’re passionate about.
CC: Network more! I was doing courses that I didn’t enjoy for most of my undergrad and I thought being a Computer Science major meant that I’d be stuck coding for the rest of my life! When I started networking, I realized there’s a lot more careers in tech that I didn’t even know of, and design turned out to be one of them!
When beginning the creative process, where do you look for inspiration?
CP: Pinterest for visual inspiration and art direction and talking to users for ideation inspiration.
AH: I find the creative process differs depending on whether it’s game design or UX design, but there’s a lot more in common than you expect as well. In terms of inspiration, when it comes to UX, it always begins with the user’s perspective. I usually try out the closest product available to what I’m designing and see what’s missing or what users could possibly wish for. Otherwise, I find just taking the extra time when you’re using products normally to make mental notes of inspiring features help a lot as well. That way, when you start designing something you have this library of good features in your memory to pull from.
CC: So many resources out there! Dribbble, behance, screenlane, pageflows, mobbin.design, growth.design, and producthunt are some of my favourites. I have a whole list on Notion that I keep adding to, let me know if you want the link!
What is one project you are most proud of and why?
CP: Vancouver Survivor, a board game and microsite to empower newcomer youth to become aware and prepared for potential earthquakes. You can view more about this project here.
AH: I’m proud of many previous projects, not because of what it’s achieved or if the product even ended up being good. I find my most memorable projects are ones that I had to overcome extreme hardships and difficult challenges with my teammates. Not sure if I can pick just one.
CC: Emerge at SFU. I teamed up with a bunch of hardworking, talented folks to create a workshop series for students breaking into design from non-design backgrounds. I led these workshops and it made me so proud to have students tell me I have inspired them to pursue a career in design! Coming from a non-design background and having to self-teach everything to ultimately landing a job was a pretty difficult journey and being able to share the knowledge of how I did it was really rewarding!
Want to learn more from these amazing designers?
Make sure to reserve your spot NOW for this amazing networking event happening on Friday, April 30tfrom 4:30-6:30 pm PST.