unambitious childhood

The first book she ever read was The Shoemaker and the Elves. She still owns it. She grew up in Saudi Arabia and South India, picking her nose in the desert sun and sucking on over-ripe mangoes in the monsoon rains. She failed dismally at all athletic endeavours, but excelled with surprisingly little effort at academic and artistic ones. Basically, she could read and write and draw really nice stick-men.

Obscure education

Many eventful years later, she completed her Bachelors degree in Visual Communication and was ranked first at the Bharathiar University in India.

For these her many troubles, she was compensated with a medal – of the highest distinction and gold plated, she was assured. But it has since changed colour significantly enough to doubt the validity of her claim altogether, and now sits in a box with other arbitrary artifacts from her past, as she can find little use for medallion of unverified origins.

By the age of 22, she had completed her Masters degree in International Business at the University of Wollongong in Dubai, writing dissertations late into the night while she embraced with abandon the years of Helvetica and film colour separations. Yes, about that –

Accidental career
2000-2011

dubai
johannesburg

She didn’t mean to become a designer. She swears it. In fact, she had very much hoped to avoid the possibility altogether. You see, she once interned at Leo Burnett in a big city in India and spent a summer in their library, poring through every Coca Cola ad ever made. Terribly intimidated by big city creatives, young enough to mistake their pretentiousness for a most enviable sort of confidence – the kind she did not then possess – and terrified of discovering she was an altogether hideous artist, she swore she would never work at an agency.

But fate and desperate times. A year later, she walked into a boutique agency in Dubai and applied for a secretarial job. To compensate for the short pay, she meekly asked to play with their new Apple Macs when they were out to lunch. She had never seen a Mac in her life. It was 2003. Dido was all over the radio, everyone was protesting the war in Iraq, and they'd just bought brand new G4s with colour-calibrated Lacie monitors. At a whopping processing speed of 400 MHz, no less. Three months later, she was on the creative team, and she never looked back. (Aside: Rubbish. In the manner of all vocational creatives, I’ve looked back hundreds of times and thought that I should have become absolutely anything else instead.)

Those were the heady days of CD backups and no Google. Working at a four man agency before print-ready pdfs were a thing, she learned a thing or two about production, and to date, she takes great pride in the fact that her artwork files are a mathematical delight, precise to the last millimeter. Nobody cares.

She went on to work as lead designer at Momentum Communications, later bought out by Huntsworth International.

In 2007, she moved to Johannesburg, South Africa. There, she managed the in-house studio at Ernst & Young, servicing all their offices in Southern Africa. During her time at EY, the firm underwent a major global rebranding under the direction of Landor, and she worked alongside some great folk to spearhead its rollout in the region, overseeing local training for the new brand.

Solo act
2011-2024

johannesburg
around-the-world
HONOLULU, HI
miamI, FL
sneads ferry, NC

Since 2011, she has worked as an independent designer, crafting visual identities and language for all manner of brands and businesses.

She did the whole “digital nomad” thing for a bit and trotted around the globe with a backpack for a few months. Along the way, she met her now-husband at a dingy hostel in Peru. Turns out he’s a U.S. Marine, so now she lives and works in America.

For some years, she was an ocean-loving island dweller in Hawaiʻi, with a rainbow on her license plate. During her time there, she worked with a killer crew of rockstar designers and thinkers at the very awesome Wall to Wall Studios, and she learned a thing or two about manapuas and ʻokinas.

She now lives in the little townlet of Sneads Ferry, North Carolina, where she has an internet connection almost all the time, but has yet to meet any Sneads.