Andy Anaya - Designer and Digital Product Developer

A string shop gave me my first web contract in high school: a guitar in exchange for a site I made with Netscape Composer.

At the Columbus College of Art and Design, I was trained in advertising, graphic design, digital illustration, photography, copywriting, project management, creative direction, and brand strategy, all of which took my web work to a whole new level.

I started as a designer with People To My Site in the Summer of '06 and for over five years worked on print design, web application design/development, and brand strategies. My work for Highlights for Children, Inc. and Zaner-Bloser have given me more intimate experience with online brand strategy and user interface design. My work for AudiologyOnline was my first remote work experience and cemented my preference for user interface design and product design projects.

I am self-taught in coding and programming, always pushing myself hard to learn more. I find myself torn between investing time with software like Axure and Adobe Xd or getting better at rapid prototyping. It seems like all the effort put into a detailed interactive wireframe could actually be effort put into building the final application, and all the effort put into learning that software could be put into learning usable code. I am currently studying functional programming and looking at Clojure + Rum/Hiccup for building applications:

(defcomponent nav [menu-items]
  [:nav
   [:ul
    (for [{:keys [text href]} menu-items]
      [:li [:a {:href href} text]])]])

Doesn’t it look so clean?

My favorite food is Indian (extra spicy), my favorite website design is Oxfam (tidy, lovely), and my favorite UI is Tilt Brush by Google (if you know, you know).