I was born in and currently live in Hong Kong. But I consider myself a citizen of the world — prior to this, I've lived in New York, Miami and Shanghai.
I currently live in Hong Kong. I took this photo in September 2021 from an area called Tsim Sha Tsui. This is Victoria Harbour, one of the world's busiest harbours, and behind it is the Central district of Hong Kong.
I began my professional career working as an editorial designer for print magazines and books. It was no where near as glamorous as The Devil Wears Prada, but it was fun! Unfortunately, over time I felt I had hit a ceiling with my designs. I didn't have a Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) around to give me new challenges.
One of my best friends was studying UX/UI design, and through her, I discovered what I was missing: that feedback loop. Since then, I took a break from print design and learned more about the iterative UX/UI design process, tech, and designing digital products.
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I enrolled in Memorisely's Design Systems Bootcamp for several reasons:
It felt like being in school again, but everybody actually wants to be there! For me, class was always after work so I had no trouble attending every single class and office hours! It was awesome learning about Design Systems with Andressa and my classmates!
The people, by far! It's been so great meeting everybody, nerding out about design systems, and learning from each others' very different design experiences. My class had people from all over the world, at different stages in their careers, so I was really interested in hearing their stories.
I was surprised by how valuable design tokens can be. Prior to the class, I didn't really understand what they were. Now, I'm going to try to implement them in the design systems I work on!
Prioritizing everything I want to learn. There's so much ground to cover and never enough time!
It's really important to:
I try to use Todoist to organize and prioritize 👇
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I try to wake up around 7:00am to catch up on what happened overnight, reply to messages, and plan my day. I'll also slowly start getting ready to leave the house for work. On my commute, I have an Apple Shortcut that will randomly generate a commute activity for me — it'll either be watch Youtube, practice French with Duolingo, listen to a podcast, or read.
I start my day off with an iced Americano. The combination of the cold temperature and caffeine really kicks start my morning. At work, I might do a variety of activities, including, build wireframes and prototypes in Figma, conduct desktop research or primary research like interviews, meet with different teams to discuss product features, and much more! There is no day that is alike.
My design systems class was around 8:00pm for me, so after finishing up with work at around 6:30pm, I usually have to rush home to inhale some dinner before class starts! If I don't have class, I go home and watch some tv to give my brain a break, before jumping into some reading about design or design systems!
Here is the view from my office window is also of Victoria Harbour 👇
One of my dinner spots 👇
I...don't have an organized aesthetically pleasing workspace 😅 I like to call it organized chaos. My very cluttered home workspace includes 2 monitors, 1 keyboard, 1 mouse, various BTS paraphernalia, food and a digital piano.
On desktop, my must have apps are:
On mobile, my must have apps are:
A digital product that blew my socks off is Linear. I discovered it about half a year ago and I really love the experience. It's a project management tool that is "supa fast" and great for collaboration. I love that it is optimized for keyboard, so you can do almost everything from the keyboard without having to move your hands back and forth to your mouse/trackpad.
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A physical product that I'm always in love with is onigiri packaging. An onigiri is a Japanese triangular rice ball that is wrapped with a sheet of seaweed. If onigiri was wrapped entirely with the seaweed touching the rice, it would get soggy from the rice's moisture.
So the packaging separates the seaweed and rice, but is easy to open so that you wouldn't have to "build" the onigiri before eating. It's genius.
Here's a Google image result of opening an onigiri. A Youtube video would probably be more effective at showing what I'm talking about though. 👇
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A couple months ago, I had a lot of friends make Blend Spotify playlists with me, so I've been listening to those lately! Basically, Spotify blended my taste and my friends' tastes into playlists that are updated daily. I love it because it's a good mix of what I enjoy, but also I discover new songs through my friends.
More on Spotify's Blend feature 👉 Blend on Spotify
