Hi, I'm Kara

I live near Dayton, OH, where I work for Elsevier as a Sr UX Specialist on the user-centered design team.   I love my job for the wide variety of roles that I am able to play on different projects.  On any given day I can be wireframing workflows and interactions, creating visual design mockups, writing code (specifically front-end code – HTML, CSS, and JS), designing and conducting user tests, working on specs, participating in innovation sessions… I get to wear a lot of different hats and work in a lot of different user experience areas.

I am particularly interested in designing for mobile devices, CSS3, HTML5, ethnography, typography, and health sciences initiatives.

I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, with three younger brothers.  My brothers and I have scattered across the United States, but my parents and most of my relatives still live in Cleveland.

I did my undergraduate work at Cornell University, where I double majored in archaeology and art history, with a couple of minors in anthropology and computer science.  When I moved from Ithaca, NY, to Ann Arbor, MI, to do graduate work, I fully intended to become a librarian (I was going to be an archivist and work with rare manuscripts) but ended up on the high-tech track instead.

When I am not working, I like to spend my time cooking, gardening, fencing with the SCA (I am studying German two-handed longsword) helping my husband with boatbuilding and brewing, working on my photography, playing with our two cats, and just keeping up with the constant repairs and maintenance that are part of being a homeowner.

I also read a lot. The people at the library know me by sight, if not by name.

If nothing else, Infogirl.org can be classified as a perpetual work in progress. I have a tendency to play around with design and style and code, get bored quickly, and periodically re-do everything. It started out as mostly a portfolio site, back in 2002 when I was getting out of grad school. At the time it seemed like a good idea to have some kind of an online presence, and it still does. At first it was a portfolio site, then it was a weblog, then a porfolio/weblog, then a weblog/portfolio, but these days it’s pretty much entirely weblog.

What's with the site name? Some of my cohort in grad school used to call me the infogirl because I read a lot (which I still do) and had a tendency to bring up odd facts and nuggets of information (which I also still do).