Let’s get to know you first. Tell us about yourself.
Hi, I’m Alice! I love lettering and art. The latter is a bit of a general term, but I just think that it’s comprised of anything that is beautiful, whether in aesthetic, function, meaning, etc. I’m exploring a lot of things right now, primarily lettering and illustration.
I grew up in Cupertino and went to Wharton for undergraduate business school. I quickly became disillusioned with the inherent meaninglessness of the common ethos of Wall Street, and I knew that I wanted to spend my life doing something creative, fun(!), and artistic. So I threw all of my time and energy into exploring design and illustration, and ended up interning at Microsoft, foursquare, and Path. I just graduated this time last year, and started at Dropbox right after. I’m a product designer and illustrator here right now, and I get to spend my days happily crafting and telling stories for our users. Lately I’ve gotten to play a lot with color and illustrations, which has been extremely fun. I also organize Dropbox’s Origins women in design series, a topic that’s important to me (check it out!).
Cool, so what’s the story behind your website and its design?
There is a wide range of work that I want to showcase, from lettering and illustration (the communicative) to product and web design (the functional). I want people to have a good sense of my style and past work without the cost of clicking through a billion thumbnails, so the primary “interaction” of the page is scrolling through, an action with far less friction.
There are also minor interaction details such as the primary table of contents row turning into the navigation bar as you begin to scroll, which then also doubles as a header of sorts when the user is on that relevant section of the page.
What part of your website is your favourite, and why?
I really love the color scheme, orange and red. These days I’m doing a lot of exploration in using different colors in my illustration work both at Dropbox and in my personal work, and that bright, fiery color is what I’m really feeling right now (as a person, hah). Also, I don’t think this color is very common in many other sites (by observation, most people are either blue or green), so I had a lot of fun experimenting with how to incorporate such a loud color in a hopefully minimal way.
Is there anything you wish you knew when you first started building your website?
I didn’t know what jekyll.js (a templating plug in) was until Dan Eden told me about it and helped me set it up. I was just resigned to copying the same header/foot elements on each individual page, which would have been a massive waste of time (thanks Dan!).
Technologies, languages, frameworks, or libraries?
I drew all of the illustrations with a 13 inch Cintiq that I take basically everywhere. :) I also use Jekyll and the rest of the site is just straight up HTML/CSS with some javascript.
Any upcoming changes we should look out for?
I just updated in last weekend, so I probably won’t touch the structure in the immediate future. But as most designers are, I’ll probably be satisfied with this for a month before I begin to want to make something better, so it’s a constant work in progress (it’ll never be “finished”).
