My name is Julia - thanks for visiting! Let me tell you a little bit about myself!

I was born in South Korea, but was adopted when I was a baby. I grew up in Silver City, New Mexico before moving to Tucson, Arizona. I majored in Fine Arts at the University of Arizona and minored in Japanese. In addition, I also studied abroad at Sophia University in Tokyo. During my college years I printed and sold my artworks, and exhibited in a couple museums. My biggest accomplishment, though, was winning a gold award at my University for my art.

After graduating, I moved to Japan in order to teach English. I worked in a small town in Tokushima called Tsurugi and lived over in Handa. I taught Junior High School students and spent a lot of time assisting them in writing and presenting their English speeches. I also worked with the other teachers on the English curriculum, lessons, and volunteered on school trips. I also collaborated heavily with the other English teachers in the prefecture in order to better our lessons for the benefit of the students.

After about two years, I felt the need to change my career and move on to something that I could really throw myself into. So, I left Tokushima and moved to Tokyo with the savings I had from working on JET.Upon moving to Tokyo, I opened up a Patreon and started freelancing my art, design and character creation skills. I joined the Twitch community and helped my friends along with other Twitch affiliates and partners create and develop their online personas with graphics and illustrations. I learned quite a bit about graphic design and advertisement in general. Even though I needed to find something a bit more stable, this time I spent honing my skills through freelancing was invaluable to me.

I started to teach myself how to code by taking a few free online introductory courses to JavaScript and found that it was alright! I then took an advanced engineering bootcamp to solidify my learning. I was able to make unique contributions to my final team project where I combined my design skills to create new characters for an AR game app.

After graduation, I found myself once again drawn to design, and pursued UI/UX - a field I had no idea existed until I entered the tech sphere properly. It was far more different than I had ever imagined, but as I continued to learn more about the research and design process, I couldn't help but feel like I found my "home" so to speak. Being able to craft personas and really get into problem solving and designing was something that was so fulfilling for me. As I continued my learning, I joined the University of Arizona's UI/UX Program in order to build my portfolio and really get myself up to speed with the wide world of Design.

Throughout this course, I had been able to realize that I had a lot of these skills such as storyboarding, sketching, and even wireframing, but I had never been able to put a word to it. Pretty exciting! I hope that with my graduation I'll be able to join a fantastic diverse team and work on designing amazing apps.

My current life story has many parts, but I really am happy with the path that I've chosen in UI/UX Design - I've found it's truly the perfect blend of Art and Human Interaction that I've been craving. I worked at Audigy, a company dedicated to creating branding and websites for audiologists, and I am very happy to have been able to utilize my skills to not only create a brand that people enjoy and feels fits them and their practice, but also create solutions that are accessible and new as well.