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Learn how to design a portfolio to stand out with Olia! We will start with a presentation followed by a Q & A towards the end.

Olia Birulia is a working professional who has more than 7 years of experience in UX Design. She is currently working as a Sr Product Designer at Strava and an Instructor at UC Berkeley Extension. Previously, she was at Visa for two years building the future of banking and payments. Her experience also includes working with start-ups that went through "Y Combinator" and "500 Startups" accelerator programs.

She graduated from SJSU with a BA in Graphic Design, holds an Interaction Design Specialization Certificate from UC San Diego, and is currently pursuing an MS Degree in Information Design and Strategy from Northwestern University. She is passionate about creating and delivering innovative and simple design solutions and wants to create user-centered products which make people's life easier.

⭒☆━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━☆⭒ Connect with Olia:

 ⭒☆━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━☆⭒ Check out Design Buddies: 

Design a Winning Portfolio

Come and learn about careers in game UX (design & research) with Design Buddies mentors, Alister, Andreia, and Andrés!

If you have anything specific you'd like to ask, submit your questions here: 

Alister is an Experience Designer at Electronic Arts specially on the Sims 4 team. He has a background in graphic design and animation. He has been in the gaming industry for 7+ years. He has worked across multiple platforms ranging from mobile, PC, and console with experience in an array of genres including casino games, war, match 3 and most recently life simulation for Sims 4. Outside of design, Alister is also a dancer on a competitive Bay Area hip hop team and cares for his Instagram famous dog.

Andreia Gonçalves is an Experience Designer originally from Portugal and now based in Vancouver, Canada. She currently works at Electronic Arts and has previously worked on both Console, PC, and Mobile games, in titles such as Plants vs Zombies: Battle for Neighborville (2019) and Oz: Broken Kingdom(2016). With a background in both Design and Programming, Andreia is passionate about bringing both together to create engaging experiences. In her free time, she enjoys learning new things, reading, and being indoors.

Andres is a Senior User Experience Researcher on the Full Sail University UX Lab. Over the past 5 years he has worked on qualitative and quantitative research projects for games like World of Tanks, Darksiders Genesis, Battle chasers: Nightwar, Remnant: From the Ashes, among others. He specializes in qualitative and mixed methods.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/andresfelipegalvis/

⭒☆━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━☆⭒ Check out Design Buddies: 

Game UX Panel

Self-awareness is not a topic that is often talked about in design circles and yet, it's one of the most important skills to develop as a designer. Framing the talk around moments in his career, Brian Lin will explain why it's the trait he looks for most when hiring, how he evaluates it, and how people can practice in order to become more self-aware.

Brian has been practicing design for 20 years and is currently Director of Design at Thriver where he builds cross-functional design teams, develops sustainable processes, and promotes design thinking upwards and sideways. Prior to that, he's done work for some of the biggest brands in the world (Nike, BMW, Cadbury, Nikon, Disney, and more) before shifting over to startups in gaming, finance, and health & wellness.

Self-Awareness: The most important design skill

Come join us for a halloween meetup! There will be a fun design challenge based on a surprise prompt. 2 winners will be randomly selected for prizes!

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Halloween Meetup

Let's have a chat around what design actually means: the total transformation of businesses and products. It's not just pretty things! Believe in your power and potential.

Steve is the Chief Design Officer at a social travel tech start up (currently in stealth), and Design Director at his agency, GÜDE CO. Previously he was Head of Product Design at Green Owl Mobile, a Product Designer at Fjord/Accenture Interactive and TD Bank, Design Lead at Jumbleberry, and Creative Director of a publishing start up. He has 10 years of experience in branding and brand strategy, product and web design, digital marketing, writing, and client consultation, working across disciplines at freelance, start up and enterprise environments. He believes in empathetic understanding, nurtures inspiring communities, and advocates for comprehensive design process.

https://www.linkedin.com/company/designbuddies/

https://www.instagram.com/design.buddies/

Owning Our Power & Impact as Designers

The world’s first scaled study on how UX and Eng collaborate.

Xinni surveyed and interviewed 277 engineers across Google and Alphabet to understand how designers collaborate with engineers, and how we can be better partners to eng when building UI.

“What tools should we use to spec for eng?

“What are traits of successful UX and eng collaborations?

This talk includes helpful guides, cheatsheets, and figma templates!

Xinni is a senior designer leading UX at YouTube Gaming. Previously, she designed for social features across YouTube and Google Translate. She graduated from National University of Singapore with a Bachelors in Computing.

Born in Singapore, her design and code journey started 10+ years ago from her obsession with Neopets and Deviantart. She is passionate about improving her partnerships with Eng, PM, and researchers - and sharing this knowledge with everyone. In her free time she likes creating art for anime conventions.

UX/ENG Collaboration: An actionable guide

Welcome to our Design Buddies Thanksgiving Figma Party! Create a Thanksgiving meal in Figma and write down what you are thankful for!

Design Buddies: Thanksgiving Meetup

Game user experience (UX) is still a new mindset in the video game industry and comes with specific challenges considering that games need to be both usable and fun. As former director of UX at Epic Games and PhD in psychology, Celia Hodent will explain her UX framework (which was used during the development of Fortnite) and offer a list of ingredients for game developers to create their own successful game recipe. The UX mindset being about putting humans first, she will also propose some ethical considerations for the video game industry.

Celia Hodent is recognized as a leader in the application of user experience (UX) and cognitive science in the game industry. Celia holds a PhD in psychology and has over ten years of experience in the development of UX strategy and processes in video game studios. Through her work at Ubisoft, LucasArts, and as Director of UX at Epic Games (Fortnite), she has contributed to many projects across multiple platforms, from PC to consoles, mobile, and VR. Celia is also the founder of the Game UX Summit, advisor for the GDC UX Summit, member of CNIL Foresight Committee in France, author of 

The Gamer’s Brain: How Neuroscience and UX can Impact Video Game Design

. She currently works as an independent consultant, helping studios increase the likelihood of their games to be engaging and successful. Celia also provides guidance on the topics of playful learning, ethics, unconscious bias, and inclusion in tech.

https://www.routledge.com/The-Psychology-of-Video-Games/Hodent/p/book/9780367493134

Advancing Game UX & Ethics

Tune in on Tuesday, Dec. 8 @ 4PM PST with the Boba UX ladies (Kelli Vu & Sarah Joo) where we'll share our case study recipe and start drafting a real design case study together!

Recipe for a Sweet Case Study 

We're excited to have Celia on for an ask me anything!

Celia Hodent is recognized as a leader in the application of user experience (UX) and cognitive science in the game industry. Celia holds a PhD in psychology and has over ten years of experience in the development of UX strategy and processes in video game studios. Through her work at Ubisoft, LucasArts, and as Director of UX at Epic Games (Fortnite), she has contributed to many projects across multiple platforms, from PC to consoles, mobile, and VR. Celia is also the founder of the Game UX Summit, advisor for the GDC UX Summit, member of CNIL Foresight Committee in France, author of The Gamer’s Brain: How Neuroscience and UX can Impact Video Game Design and of The Psychology of Video Games. She currently works as an independent consultant, helping studios increase the likelihood of their games to be engaging and successful. Celia also provides guidance on the topics of playful learning, ethics, unconscious bias, and inclusion in tech.

Past Event Recording (Advancing Game UX & Ethics): 

https://www.routledge.com/The-Psychology-of-Video-Games/Hodent/p/book/9780367493134﻿

Ask Me Anything: Celia Hodent

Hey Buddies! 🐰🎮 Come join our kick-off event for our first community game jam! The theme will be revealed at this meeting.

https://itch.io/jam/design-buddies-game-jam

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/179ZQuoKdaB2PlWnQ2JzokxJcopDX1aL1loJDhdu01bg/edit?usp=sharing

Design Buddies 1st Game Jam - Kick Off

Come see games our community has created during our first game jam! Winners will also be revealed here!

Game Jam: Demo Day

Welcome to the Design Buddies Winter Party! Please join us for a Figma party celebrating the holidays, new year, and winter! Design winter sweaters, create your own snowman, decorate Christmas trees, and more! Bring your own hot chocolate. Looking forward to seeing you there!

Design Buddies Winter Party

Why are some designers constantly pushing pixels while others aren’t?

Why is it that some designers are much faster and consistent when creating UI?

Nowadays, being able to create pixel-perfect designs in a fraction of the time is an essential skill to keep your competitive edge.

Whether you’re a graphic designer, UX designer, or another type of designer, you can utilize the power of design systems to take your skill set to the next level.

In this talk, we’ll discuss what design systems are, what they are composed of, and how you can add them to your work process.

Ludovic and Colton are co-founders of Kickass UX, an education platform dedicated to helping graphic designers transition to UX.

Previously, Ludovic was Senior UX designer at Smartsheet, where he designed product solutions and implemented mobile and desktop design systems from the ground up.

Colton was also a Senior UX designer at Smartsheet, where he worked across the entire product. In the last few years, he focused on solving some of the most complex solutions for enterprise administration and program management.

https://www.kickassux.com/free-crash-course

https://www.linkedin.com/company/kickassux

Design Systems 101: Become a better designer by utilizing the power of design systems

Join us at our biweekly Game Club hosted by Maggie (@maggie pena#1249)! We meet the 

The meetings will take place in the Game Club voice channel on Discord:

If you can’t see this channel, make sure to head to 

Design Buddies is an inclusive design community aimed to connect and empower designers by providing free resources, events, mentorship, and more.

Game Club 

Start off the new year with a bang and get your case study decks looking snazzy with the Boba UX Ladies on Jan 19, 2021 @ 5PM PST! Kelli will share her tips & tricks on how to prepare an awesome-looking case study presentation for your next job interview and some examples! Also, remember to stick around for the Q&A and group photo!

﻿https://www.linkedin.com/in/phiyen-vu/﻿

﻿https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarah-joo/﻿

Formula for a Case Study Deck

Using three objects that the participants bring to the workshop, creative strategist, Michaela Ternasky-Holland, will explore experience design within the three-act structure of onboarding, story, and aftercare. This workshop is designed to activate the mindset of audience perspective and participation as well as equip creators with thinking about the different technologies and ways to craft an experience.

 award-winning documentarian, who combines experimental content with traditional mediums. She works with clients as a consultant and creative strategist. She is a recognized 

 who has presented at international conferences, public institutions, and podcasts. Her work has been featured by 

Not only does she strive to be a part of purpose-driven projects that vocalize and educate about diversity in storytelling, but she also works in tandem with decision-makers, committees, and boards of directors that financially support, mentor, and create opportunities for those of all backgrounds. In short, she works for the impact of the projects to move beyond the project itself.

She has been invaluable within these spaces to raise awareness concerning but not limited to: privilege, neurodivergent, differing physical abilities, ethnicities, sexual identifications, and age.

Recently, she produced and co-created a 2020 virtual reality project named, 

 at Cannes XR and is a finalist in the International VR Awards in the category of 

Her previous employment with the Walt Disney Company sparked her interest in building worlds, and her central vision is to find the perfect marriage between the integrity of the narrative and a guest’s interaction with emerging technology.

https://www.instagram.com/michaelaternaskyholland/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelaaternaskyholland

https://flow.page/michaelaternaskyholland

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/american-voices/

https://www.si.com/specials/everest-climb-virtual-reality/index.html

Building Blocks for Experience Design Workshop

We're super excited to be hosting Ludovic and Colton, Co-Founders of Kickass UX on again for an ask me anything style event. Join us and learn anything about transitioning to the UX field!

Transitioning to UX

User Experience Design is a continuously developing field. Each organization has its own set of requirements and expectations from incoming UX designers. Up your job application and interview game with Natashia, a proven design leader with a focus on attracting and retaining top design talent. Learn what hiring managers look for in candidates, find out what “soft” and “hard” skills are important to decision-makers, tips & tricks, and followed by AMA.

Natashia is a Sr Manager of Product Design with broad experience at the intersection of design, data, technology, and marketing. Currently at EA, she’s humanizing technology and the workplace while building cross-functional design teams and developing sustainable processes. Her passion has brought her to design mentorship and leadership in diversity and inclusion. In her spare time, Natashia shares truths and positivity in beautifully designed three words.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/natashiatjandra/

UX Hiring Managers, Demystified

There are many aspects that go into building a successful career in design, whether you’re focused on experience design, graphic design, or one of the many facets of digital design today. Establishing and maintaining a personal brand, an identity that you’re known for and knowledgeable in, can help to open opportunities for you, and focus your work. Commonly the portfolio is a hot button topic when it comes to job searches and career growth, but in the session we’ll explore other important topics important to fueling your career, and look at how to design a cohesive brand identity across many platforms, beyond just mastering the portfolio.

If you’d like to create along with us please download 

Starter Kit (copy and paste into browser): 

🎉 We will also be giving away 6 one-year Creative Cloud subscriptions and mentorship sessions from Adobe to community favorite and judges choice of your workshop deliverables in the #☁️personal-branding-event-submissions channel in our 

 is a Designer Advocate, and XD Instructor for Adobe, based in Waterloo Canada. Coming from nearly a decade in product design, across travel, autonomous vehicles, EdTech and advertising technology, he’s now focused on equipping designers with resources to design the best experiences using Adobe XD. He has a passion for user experience, and developing the design community.

 is a strategic designer with a focus on UI/UX design in the wellness space. This year as an Adobe Creative Resident, Maddy is exploring ways to help people achieve their wellness goals using tech, while intentionally designing these products to promote more mindful tech use. She loves sharing her process and learnings with the creative community on Instagram and her YouTube channel.

Crafting your Personal Brand - A Hands On Event with Adobe

Hey Buddies! 👋 We have our next community meetup on 2/27 where we will be designing lanterns together! RSVP for this event and the correct timezone will appear on your calendar.

Instead of Zoom this time, we will be meeting up in the voice/video chat channels in our Discord community!

🐰 Hop into our community and connect with us

Lantern Festival Meetup with Design Buddies

Ever wanted to create animated GIFs or short videos? Whether it’s for a case study or a high quality meme, GIF making is a valuable skill. You will also learn how to screen record and turn those recordings into GIFs or short videos. We’ll even allot time to make and share your own GIFs! Happy GIF making 🎉

Adobe Photoshop is required for this workshop.

This event is hosted by the Design Buddies Community, an inclusive design community!

 https://www.linkedin.com/company/designbuddies/

Creating Animated GIFs in Photoshop

Learn how to create stunning logo animations and bring your logo designs to live with Auto-Animate in Adobe XD. Follow along as we create the design, animate and export for review or publication. This session is for everybody who would like to learn logo animation in a guided step-by-step process.

https://tinyurl.com/LogoAnimationStarterFile

🎉 We will also be giving away 6 one-year Creative Cloud subscriptions and mentorship sessions from Adobe to community favorite and judges choice of your workshop deliverables in the 

Julia is an independent designer and instructor for Adobe. Her interdisciplinary work lies at the intersection of strategy, branding, packaging, and marketing. Julia is building a design community on Instagram and YouTube, where she is sharing her knowledge and experiences on an international level. She is passionate about supporting young creatives and career transitioning individuals in their process of learning design. In her free time, you can find Julia playing with her dog or in her studio planing out exciting projects and collaborations.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmuWU8GEBoRNun7hse03u1w

Logo Animation - A Hands On Event

Ask Natashia, Alister, Andreia, and Andres anything from what skills are on-demand in the industry to how to get into the gaming industry to their favorite dad jokes. Submit your product or enterprise design and game design questions and upvote topics via Slido (available live during the event). If you are somebunny who wants to hop into the gaming industry, Hop into UX in the Gaming Industry with the Fluffle Fam is the event for you! 🎉

Natashia Tjandra is a Sr Manager of Product Design with broad experience at the intersection of design, data, technology, and marketing. Currently at EA, she’s humanizing technology and the workplace while building cross-functional design teams and developing sustainable processes. Her passion has brought her to design mentorship and leadership in diversity and inclusion. In her spare time, Natashia shares truths and positivity in beautifully designed three words.

Alister Lee is an Experience Designer at Electronic Arts specially on the Sims 4 team. He has a background in graphic design and animation. He has been in the gaming industry for 7+ years. He has worked across multiple platforms ranging from mobile, PC, and console with experience in an array of genres including casino games, war, match 3 and most recently life simulation for Sims 4. Outside of design, Alister is also a dancer on a competitive Bay Area hip hop team and cares for his Instagram famous dog.

Andrés Felipe Galvis Sepúlveda is a Senior User Experience Researcher on the Full Sail University UX Lab. Over the past 5 years he has worked on qualitative and quantitative research projects for games like World of Tanks, Darksiders Genesis, Battle chasers: Nightwar, Remnant: From the Ashes, among others. He specializes in qualitative and mixed methods.

Hop into UX in the Games Industry

If you're wondering how to get started in UX or considering a bootcamp, the Boba UX ladies will be talking about their personal journey into UX to share their perspective. And of course, we’ll leave time for Q&A and a group photo.

RSVP for a Boba UX story time on Tuesday, March 9 @ 5PM PST (8PM EST).

Our Journey into UX

If you’re breaking into UX or looking for your next opportunity, the job search can be tedious and unflattering. At Springboard, we’ve distilled our collective student experiences down and identified strategies that are critical for breaking into UX. Join Career Coach Calvin as he walks through 5 key components to a successful job search.

 comes equipped with over a decade of experience working on both sides of employment services. He has dedicated his career to helping build great teams and helping talented professionals and students successfully navigate the job-search landscape. For the past few years, Calvin has been working at Springboard on the UX/UI Design Career Tracks and preparing students to land awesome roles. As a fellow bootcamp graduate himself, Calvin has an appreciation for the work and commitment needed to succeed, and a love for design. When he’s not working with the top-notch students at Springboard, you can find him tinkering with DIY projects, checking out local indie bands, and exploring all the Pacific Northwest has to offer.

 is a Career Services Manager for the Design Vertical at Springboard, building and supporting a team of talented career coaches in helping students land jobs! She has 10+ years of experience working with career changers and advancers pursuing opportunities at various companies within the Bay Area and other metro areas. She has also worked closely with hiring managers and recruiters in many sectors - including consulting, tech, finance, and healthcare - to understand their hiring needs and how students can become competitive candidates. Neepa holds a Masters in Counseling, specializing in Career Counseling, and has an MBA in Human Resource Management.

https://www.linkedin.com/school/springboard/

🐰 Hop into the Design Buddies Community

How to Stand Out as a UX Job Seeker

Tune in on 3/13 for a tutorial and Q&A about how to use 

! The Fluffle Fam highly requested this in our 

1. Onboarding onto Design Buddies' Discord community

3. Types of channels: Resources, general discussion, ask for help, topic discussions, critique, clubs, showcase, social media engagement, off-topic (non design), voice channels, and bots

4. How to access free perks only in Discord

How to use Discord - Learn with Design Buddies

 mentors on a fireside chat about their journey to design leadership and what they learned along the way. Submit your questions & topics you would like to hear about on Luma!

 is the Design Lead at MLSE Digital Labs, currently focused on growing user-centred design across the organization. He is also working on initiatives to improve sports performance and player health using data with the Raptors, Leafs and TFC.

Having been part of many early-stage design teams, Eugene has had the fortune of shaping multiple design practices from the ground up. He is driven by a passion for helping people, facilitating change, and driving better organizational processes and culture.

 is a Sr Manager of Product Design with broad experience at the intersection of design, data, technology, and marketing. Currently at EA, she’s humanizing technology and the workplace while building cross-functional design teams and developing sustainable processes. Her passion has brought her to design mentorship and leadership in diversity and inclusion. In her spare time, Natashia shares truths and positivity in beautifully designed three words.

Dropping positivity and truths in 3 words: 

 is a product design and CX leader driving innovation through deep collaboration, data, partnership, and human-centered design processes. Currently, Giti is leading a global pod of design managers at Smartsheet.

 is the Creative Art Director at Shapermint. With a full background in environmental design, packaging, and brand identity. This Argentinian woman conquered some of the most well-known growing eCommerce brands by enhancing their identities and boosting their image.

With an important focus on the Direct-Response word, where she brought her passions alive, strategy towards creativity, all working for the same team.

Her enthusiasm for always learning and growing, brought her to design mentorship. Willing to guide, share tools, and boost everyone who’s looking for some design advice. As part of Marcia’s DNA, it’s fulled of colors, fonts-characters, and outline shapes. Her calligraphy roots, let her trademark in any creative project she’s involved in.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/marciadellarosa/

ADPList is a global community for designers, by designers - an initiative connecting designers with jobs and mentorships.

We hope to see you all here, Buddies and Amazing Designers!

Adventure to Design Leadership

Building your brand can feel like a daunting challenge. Whether you are an experience designer, illustrator, graphic designer, or focused in another discipline, the details shared in Trustworthy can help you elevate your brand.   With a focus on voice, volume, and vulnerability, Margot Bloomstein provides a framework of actionable advice using examples from brands like TED, Zoom, Mailchimp, and the FBI that will help you empower your audience and build your brand.  

Join us for a fireside chat on her book Trustworthy and ask anything from helpful tips on starting out on social media, to building your brand’s voice and community, and beyond!

Margot Bloomstein has worked as a content strategist for more than 20 years, consulting with clients in a range of industries, from software-as-a-service to footwear technology to 401(k)s. She is the author of “Content Strategy at Work” and the new “Trustworthy: How the Smartest Brands Beat Cynicism and Bridge the Trust Gap”.

https://www.booksmith.com/book/9781989603925

Building Trust & Creating Value With Your Brand

Design Buddies is excited to start our first portfolio review series on Discord! You may submit your portfolio on Luma beforehand if you’d like to have your portfolio reviewed live by the Design Buddies Admin team and mentors.

Before each review, please prepare to talk for a few minutes about your portfolio, your goals, and what feedback you’re looking for. Each portfolio will be reviewed for 10-15 mins and you can ask questions in our text channels. Everyone, including listeners, are welcome to attend and ask questions. It will be an interactive session with the community! 

This event will be held on our Event text and voice channel:

Grace Ling, Maggie Pena, Nadia Le, Sara Georgas, Ben Ellsworth, and more (TBD)

Design Buddies: Portfolio Reviews #1

Always wanted to learn how to create social media assets for your personal brand? In this session we are going to create templates that will help you be more efficient in your social media design process. In addition to that we are going to explore how animation can be part of your social media campaigns.

https://tinyurl.com/SocialAnimationStarterFile

🎉 We will also be giving away 9 one-year Creative Cloud subscriptions and mentorship sessions from Adobe to community favorite and judges choice of your workshop deliverables in the 

#☁️social media-animations-event-submissions

! 3 Creative Cloud subscriptions will also be given to 3 random attendees live during the event.

Social Media Animation - A Hands On Event

Join us at our biweekly Typography Book Club hosted by Noon (@moniqueisneat)! We meet 

. Have you ever wondered what's the best font to use for the project? Anatomy of a Typeface By Alexander Lawson will help give you an insight into the typefaces that are important to today's typographers, and why. 

Typography is so much more than just choosing a beautiful font, it's selecting the right font. Good typography will establish a successful visual hierarchy, provide a graphic balance, and set the product’s overall tone. Good typography will seduce your audience and ill-informed type choices will repulse them. 

We invite you to join us in beginning the first of the three legendary type books that will help you become a type master:

The meetings will take place in the Typography Book Club voice channel on Discord:

​Design Buddies is an inclusive design community aimed to connect and empower designers by providing free resources, events, mentorship, and more.

​​​​​​​​​​​​👋 Visit our 

​​​​​​​​​​​​🌟 Watch our 

​​​​​​​​🎨Join us in style with our 

Typography Book Club

Design Buddies was born on April 10th, 2020. It started as a casual fun community to hang out & learn design during the pandemic. Since then, we have grown to be the largest design community in the world thanks to all of you Buddies! 

This event will take place on Zoom (same link as the one on Luma) and Discord!

 was discouraged by her professors to pursue design and stick to engineering for her career at the end of 2019, she refused to listen and kept moving forward. She stumbled into online design communities but felt like a small potato in this vast world of design with no design degree or certificate. She felt like she didn’t belong, and just wanted a wholesome place to talk about design. Thus, Design Buddies was born! 

A big inspiration behind Design Buddies’s brand was also Grace’s experiences with toxic gaming communities. As a former target of cyberbullying, Grace has been determined to create an inclusive space where all voices may be respected.

Without our admin team, focus group, strategic advisors, content creators, event coordinators, designers, mentors, club leaders, and nearly 20,000 of you in our community, none of this would be possible. Special thanks to our leads: 

Design Buddies: 1-Year Birthday Party

Get an introduction on how PMs and Designers work together effectively. Hear first-hand from a team of designers and a PM at LinkedIn to understand their day-to-day responsibilities. The session will include an overview of their roles, understanding the relationships between PM and Design, and discussing how they work together as a team to build products.

 is a Design Manager at LinkedIn and has been at the company for 4 years. She currently is managing a team of designers on the Pages product, which enables organizations to create an online presence on LinkedIn. Previously, she worked as a consultant at Deloitte for 5 years doing technology implementations across the technology, retail, healthcare, and finance industries. She has a Masters of Interaction Design at CCA and a Bachelors of Business from the University of Notre Dame. 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristineyuen/

 is a Group Product Manager at LinkedIn. He leads a cross-functional team working on Audiences and Measurement under the LinkedIn Marketing Solutions product, which enables customers to find and connect with members through the ads platform. He has 7+ years of experience working as a PM at places such as Google. He previously pivoted from healthcare as a clinical researcher. He studied Biophysics, Physiology, Public Health, and Molecular Biology at Georgetown, Harvard, and UCLA.  

 is a Senior UX Designer at LinkedIn. He has 6+ years of experience working as a UX Designer at past companies such as Google and startups. He is leading the design experience for LinkedIn Live, which is a new video broadcast experience on LinkedIn. He has a BFA in Computer Animation and Interactive Media from the Fashion Institute of Technology in NYC.

Working together as Designers and Product Managers

Join us on a super casual night of meeting new people & making new friends! The purpose of this event is to network less formally and instead, focus on forming genuine connections with each other. Grab a snack, muster up your courage, and shoot your friendship shot!

This event will take place on Discord Stages in Design Buddies (

), and we will be using the text channel (

) to share bios and connect with fellow Buddies! 

: Designer @ Electronic Arts, Founder & Design Lead @ Design Buddies

: UX/UI Designer @ Foko Retail, Community Lead @ Design Buddies

Pixel Push Your Friendship Shot

 in a fun evening of storytimes from their experience as design leaders. You may come and share your crazy stories with the community, too! 

This event will take place on Discord Stages in the 

 is a Senior Manager of Product Design with broad experience at the intersection of design, data, technology, and marketing. Her career has led her through different disciplines in design: designing fonts and typefaces, creating 360 ad campaigns for prestigious global brands, co-running her own design consultancy, and leading design teams in the #1 global consulting management company. Currently at EA, she’s humanizing technology and the workplace while building cross-functional design teams and developing sustainable processes. Her passion has brought her to design mentorship, she volunteers her time with ADPList and Design Buddies, and leadership in diversity and inclusion. In her spare time, Natashia shares truths and positivity in beautifully designed three words.