My work
PRODUCT DESIGN & DIRECTION:
Pear Practice
Turning practice into play.
The greatest and most rewarding challenge of my professional career so far. In 2021, I was chosen for a small but mighty team to build the newest Pear Deck Learning project, a gamified retrieval practice product for K-12 students. I served as Principal Creative Director on the project, helping bring it from a scattered collection of ideas and Confluence notes to a fully functioning, beautiful, and highly effective product. It’s impossible to show all the countless hours of work in one place, but I’ll share a taste here.
Pear Practice was built to achieve three primary goals:
Simplify busy teachers’ lives by enabling effortless differentiated instruction.
Build positive classroom community by encouraging collaboration and rewarding teamwork.
Increase student engagement (and outcomes) by making practice fun, rewarding, and personal.
I was tasked with creating the avatar system: digital representations of students that would serve both as their illustrated self in class sessions, and also as the major motivator for individual practice.
Together, my team and I produced over 1,000 earnable items for students’ avatars.
In addition to creating the avatars, my responsibilities included:
Developing the new brand
Handling creative direction for our external agency partners
Learning and implementing Esoteric Spine to animate avatars
Utilizing Lottie and Rive to build in-product animations
Visiting schools to get student feedback and watch playtests
Working with Engineering to implement the avatar system
Designing maps, levels, and game modes
Composing original music and recording sound effects
Writing copy & flavor text
Hiring and managing a creative team
Creating marketing materials, merch, and videos
Planning seasonal and monthly challenges for continued engagement
Working with external experts to ensure best-in-class inclusivity and accessibility
Adding Flavor
To achieve the tone we were going for, we knew it wouldn’t be enough to just drop items in kids’ lockers. We took inspiration from games we loved, like Donut County, and included flavor text for every item kids received. All in all, I wrote nearly 1,200 “dad jokes” during my time with Pear Practice.
Sounds of the City
I wanted the Pear Practice experience to have a particular sound and feel. Finding stock music to fit the bill proved challenging, so I wrote and recorded original music and sound effects to fit the game. I continued recording new tracks to suit the theme of each season.
Real engagement, real results.
1.5 million
sessions practiced
40%
of students practiced independently
2 grade levels
raised on average through practice
Illustration Work
Illustration has always been a major passion of mine and a cornerstone of my career. Though I primarily work in digital media (mostly Photoshop, Illustrator, and Procreate), I do branch out into the traditional now and then, and especially love a good linocut or screenprint.
I also enjoy using my background in studio fibers to explore surface design, like repeating fabric patterns. Here are a few selected works.
Video & Animation Work
Animation, to me, feels like a natural extension of illustration. If you have a vision for the world you’re building, it’s easiest (and most satisfying) if you can make your characters and objects move the way you want them to. In my in-house and client-facing work, I’ve used Adobe After Effects and Character Animator, Lottie, Rive, and Esoteric Spine.
These are some in-product animations I built for Pear Practice, generally using some combination of AE, Lottie, and Rive.
Violit Hour:
Wild Western Collection
I spent a lovely weekend on a Colorado ranch shooting photos and video to promote Violit Hour’s new Wild Western collection. (My husband shot the drone footage, too!) This project was a lot of fun and my only regret is that we couldn’t use more of the photos and footage in this very short video.
Pear Deck:
Add Audio Promo
During the COVID-19 school shutdowns, teachers frequently requested a feature that would let them add audio recordings to their Pear Deck slides. Our engineering team built the feature, but we had to get creative about how to market it, when we couldn’t go to schools or studios to film anything. This was the result.
Pear Deck:
Shared Teacher Dashboard Promo
Another COVID feature, Shared Teacher Dashboard let teachers share control of a Pear Deck classroom. We still couldn’t film, so we turned to animation to get the point across, telling the story of several educators rallying around a single struggling student.
Pear Practice:
”Project Pear” Teaser Announcement
This was a fun one. Before Pear Practice was called Pear Practice, it was Project Pear. We announced it publicly at ISTE 2022, the largest EdTech conference in North America. To prepare for the announcement, we hired a film crew and traveled to Liverpool, NY, to record real classrooms playing Pear Practice sessions. Many of the UX elements have changed since the prototype days, but even from the beginning, teachers and students were enthusiastic about Pear Practice.
IS IT ME YOU'RE LOOKING FOR?
IS IT ME YOU'RE LOOKING FOR?
Ready to work together? Have questions? Want to show me your dog? Drop me a line.