Think
Barbara Kruger,
but optimistic.

I asked myself to give myself a design brief for this portfolio process. Here’s what happened:

The entire idea of Serene’s portfolio is that she is super flexible, chill, supportive, friendly, collaborative, and a thoughtful design lead. Serene comes from a strong background in experimental newsprint media design, where she honed the art of attention vs. information.

Serene most recently spent half a decade in the agency world, choosing to work under a Creative Director to learn the ropes of multifaceted agency design. She is excited to jump into a lead role again, as she loves working with a team, brings strong communication and management skills, and loves learning with and from other designers while helping support and direct their skills. She strongly believes in live work mental health balance, hyping people up, and thoughtfully cultivating a design product from the best of everyone’s abilities. She believes designers produce their best work in environments centered around mutual respect and earnest engagement with the design process. She is pretty much able to get excited about any project or concept, as long as respect for the product and the process is present, from both the perspective of the design team and the client.

Her favorite design projects are not the slick, minimal ones, the trendy, or the hip. She loves enduring, lasting, impactful design, like propaganda. Think: The Barbara Kruger of optimism.

With a natural tendency to throw herself into all facets of the design experience, she has worked in UI and UX for web, marketing for ecommerce and retail, copywriting and brand voice, building and launching brands and awareness campaigns, managing design teams, and leading studio and location photoshoots from sketch to finished design.

Serene is usually either designing, learning, or absorbing energy from the sun before she inevitably returns to doing one of those two things. She is mildly compulsive about learning and then synthesizing the information into cartoons, scripts, videos, and fresh narratives for optimistic sci fi. When she hit 40, she decided it was time to start running half marathons with her sister. Beach air regulates her nervous system. She loves reading about philosophy, psychology, history, and science, and lives in Los Angeles’ Leimert Park with her family and way too many animals.