I am many adjectives,
I am also just Jesi.
Kansas City, Missouri
I've been making things on the internet since high school in the 90s, which is longer than I usually admit out loud, and I was making things on a screen well before that. It 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.
The making, in order
- The 80s and 90s
- Nintendo with my brother Eddie, who is eight years older, so games arrived already loved by someone I looked up to. Then a VTech Video Painter under the Christmas tree, a tablet that plugged into the family TV. Making things was play first, and it never really stopped being that.
- High school
- An HTML class at fifteen, then Photoshop, then a Wacom tablet I asked for without expecting a yes. I built sites on Tripod and was sure I was going to be a graphic designer.
- 2008 – 2010
- Studio art and creative writing, then a master's in game design at SMU Guildhall, making art for games.
- 2010s
- Fifteen years of product design, most of it K-12. The stretch where dabbler became builder and the making became the job.
- Now
- Oils, gouache, and code in the same week, with AI in the loop for the code. Same habit, newer tools.
The tools changed every few years. Wanting to make the thing never did, which is most of what I know about learning a new one.
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.