Instructional Design and Curriculum Design

Fashion Styling Foundations

As a Multimedia Instructional Designer for Yellowbrick, I created original online courses in creative fields such as Fashion Styling. Yellowbrick partners with educational and brand partners such as NYU, Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), Rolling Stone, and Women's Wear Daily (WWD) to ensure course content is comprehensive and equivalent to core standards and knowledge needed to succeed in these industries.

Completely asynchronous and online, the courses are broken up into video lessons given by experts and educators working in the field. To build the content, I conducted interviews with subject matter experts in our NY and LA studios, then reviewed the transcripts and edited the hour-long interviews into 2-3 minute lessons for our learning platform. For this course, I interviewed WWD Style Director, Alex Badia, Lemonade stylist, Newheart Ohanian, and the Chair of FIT's Fashion Styling Program, Sadia Seymour.

Click image to see the full course introduction.

Our custom learning management system (LMS) is Wordpress-based, and this is where the educational videos, readings, assessments, and project-based activities are hosted. A variety of assessment types are employed to ensure retention of the material, and the project-based activities are actual tasks that they would do as a Fashion Stylist. Students are able to build their portfolio with relevant projects as they work through the course material.

Click to read the full assignment text.

At Globaloria, I designed and wrote game design tutorials for middle and high school students. These tutorials taught users how to code in Javascript, and use Unity 3D and Flash to make educational games. They were broken down into simple steps and formatted in a custom wiki-style platform.

In order to motivate students to succeed, we added gamification elements to our platform, so users could earn badges as they completed assignments. I designed all the iconography, badge levels, and the system of "leveling up" for our proprietary platform.

I also led in person and virtual professional development sessions with 100+ educators across the US. I taught teachers how to code, animate, and lead their classrooms to success.

We always wanted to be available for our students and educators, so I ran a live help desk team to help users with any part of our learning system. I provided coding and debugging support, help with ideas for games, as well as help with using the platform or assignments.

I always enjoy flexing my creative muscles and designed this sample game, Kitty Math, to demonstrate the curriculum to users as I walked them through the tutorials and training materials.

As the Art Director for Constructing Modern Knowledge Press, an emerging publisher of books about the maker movement, and Cymbal Press, its imprint for books about jazz musicians, my main responsibility is to design the look and feel of our output. These book covers feature original illustrations, graphics, and custom typography.

The first book released under the Cymbal Press imprint, Life in E Flat: The Autobiography of Phil Woods, was named the 2021 Book of the Year by the Jazz Journalists Association.

Drawing on my experience as a curriculum designer, I laid out the Invent to Learn Guide to Fun to be an easy to follow guide with step-by-step instructions for classroom technology projects.

To promote Invent to Learn, our book frequently hailed as the bible of the maker movement, I created a playful robot character that became the mascot of the Invent to Learn franchise. In addition to printed posters and postcards, I made banners and digital assets to be featured on CMK Press' website and social media pages.

As the Art Director of Blunderbuss Magazine, I was in charge of managing a team of artists and photographers that supplied the images that accompanied the written work. In addition to this, I was in charge of the look and feel of the printed editions, coordinating with contractors, and laying the issues out in InDesign.

To achieve the newspaper-inspired style, I worked with the printers directly, making sure the paper weight and color printing were acceptable.

Additionally, I provided original, full-color illustrations for the magazine as needed. This is the centerfold of our second issue.

Click to view the image in all its glory.

In 2016, Blunderbuss moved to a subscription-based model to support the magazine. I created this simple and fun animated video to send to supporters and embed in our Patreon page.

As the Marketing Designer at SmartSign, I had the opportunity to brainstorm and create projects to feature on our B2B and B2C retail websites. I enjoyed the process of creating iconography and woodcut style drawings and mixing that with typography to take dull workplace signage and make them more attractive.

Some of my favorite projects were ones that made me feel like I was making a difference, like designing the icons and layout of these colorful recycling stickers.

Signage doesn't have to be boring, this humorous sign is one from a large project where I researched obscure and silly laws in every state and made them into novelty signs.

Designing these breast cancer self exam tags was extremely fulfilling, and SmartSign partnered with hospitals, gyms, and other local businesses in Brooklyn to give away hundreds of these tags during Breast Cancer Awareness month.

BikeGuard is an initiative to help reunite people with their lost bikes. I designed the website, workflow, illustrations and icons with simplicity in mind, with an easy to use registration process.

We promoted the new website with signage and posters that featured original illustrations and easy-to-follow instructions on how to sign up for the program.

I had the opportunity to apply my quirky and fun drawing style to these workplace safety posters, taking the boilerplate language and adding these cute animal characters.