I am lots of adjectives,
but I answer to Jesi.
Kansas City, Missouri
I've been making things on the internet since I was in high school, which is longer than I usually admit out loud. That turned into fifteen years of product design, most of it in K-12, and somewhere in the middle of it a master's in game design from SMU Guildhall.
I'm now most of the way through a master's in counseling. People tend to read that as a swerve. It has never felt like one. I spent years building things meant to help kids learn and kept arriving at questions product design doesn't answer on its own, so I went and studied the field that does.
How my brain works
I'm autistic and ADHD. In practice that means I read systems quickly and I'm pulled toward the parts everyone else routes around. When something is vague, I go in and stay there until it has a shape.
It also means I work in a rhythm rather than at a constant rate. Some days go deep, some stay light, and the deep ones are where the real work happens. I've stopped apologizing for that, partly because it's how I'm built and partly because I think it's right. We have tools that make us faster than we have ever been, which makes it more important, not less, to spend real time making sure we're building the right thing.
Speed is not the same as direction.
The rest of it
I paint and illustrate. Oils, watercolor, gouache, digital, collage, whatever the piece seems to want. I write. I build small products on nights and weekends because making something is the fastest way for me to understand it, and because it's fun, which is a sufficient reason on its own.
I used to keep all of that in a separate box from the professional work. I don't anymore. The game design degree is why I understand motivation. The painting is why I think about composition before color, in pictures and in products. The counseling training is why I believe a person's state when they arrive matters more than anything I put on a screen. None of it was a detour.
I live in Kansas City. The counseling work is at jessicaloredo.com/counseling. The art and more personal writing live on a separate blog, and I'm happy to share it if you ask.