designbyritzie

[designbyritzie]

The blog begins

Well... here we go... a blog about design by me, Ritzie James Williams. I guess I'll start out with a little back story about myself and why my thoughts and opinions matter when it comes to design.

I grew up in the San Fernando Valley, Mostly North Hollywood, Los Angeles, California. During my youth, my mother worked at and eventually owned a mailbox business. I used to walk home after school and play on her MS-DOS computers and other random tech stuff that was there. After selling that business and a lot of family drama, we moved to North Hollywood. I started going to school, made some great friends, and heavily got into basketball, video games, and a super long-term relationship.

These were hands down some of the best years of my life. During these years we discovered the internet which was AOL Dial-Up, ran up our parents bills texting, going to Internet Cafes and playing Diablo 2 and Counter-Strike, catching the bus to play Dance Dance Revolution at Castle Park, and Basketball every time the local gym was open. Eventually, we all grew up...

My brother and I started pursuing basketball very heavily developing a strong work ethic and platform for social status. During this time social media was coming along. I used to have the coolest and MySpace, which was actually my first interaction with HTML and CSS. I remember signing up for a facebook in 10th grade because it was supposed to be the “college social media.” Point and case, I maintained some technological practice throughout my NBA pursuit.

College time and I’ve got two options: 1. Go to CSUN for fine art, not really knowing what I was going to do but I was pretty good at drawing, or 2. Risk it and try basketball more serious than I ever have before. I made the decision to go with option 2 the day school was supposed to start (CSUN didn’t drop me from the classes despite not attending, which played a factor on my D1 eligibility later). I went to College of the Canyons for a while but ended up playing at Pierce College in 2008.

The year was rough. I didn’t play as much as I wanted and got stuck playing a position I really wasn’t supposed to be playing. I had to guard a few 7-footers and I gave them a game to remember. I went and made the team of every surrounding Community Colleges but at some point, I realized I don’t want to be tired and sore every day for the rest of my life. I then thought about what else I was passionate about and immediately signed up for ITT Tech’s Digital Entertainment and Game Design program.

It was a total scam. A year into my Visual Communication associates degree, they dropped the Game Design program. Fortunately, I was able to meet some people who helped me later in my design career. I set out into the workforce with knowledge of Adobe Suite and minimal coding experience...

My first job in the design field was for an online woman’s shoe company called Tieks by Gavrieli. I was hired as a personal assistant/shipping manager but got to put my design skills to use. I was in charge of designing new pages and redesigning legacy pages that had been quickly thrown together prior to my employment. In redesigning the homepage I ran into a problem: We had too many links in our header section. I also sat across from the customer service representatives so I was able to hear customers problems. I figured the two problems could be solved the same way; by creating a “customer care” section which helped lead users to our helpful pages such as the FAQ, size guide, shipping details, and contact methods. This reduced the number of links on our header section, increased traffic on the informative pages, and reduced calls to the customer service reps. This was my first experience in which I designed for a better user experience.

Unfortunately, I was only making $9/hour so I had to progress my career into different territory. I drifted for a few years, trying out different aspects of life. I tried acting and took a small job as creative director for Eight1Eight Apparel and Footwear. They also managed Brotherhood Barbershop, Therapy Beauty Bar, Fresh Kids Club, and Brotherhood ENT(Hollywood Club Promotion Business).

In October of 2014, I was offered a job, by two of my teachers at ITT Tech, as a web designer at iBrand/Quantum Solution. This is where I went full beast mode in design. There were 3 senior designers, 2 other web designers in similar positions I was in, and multiple people that came after me. This was the first time I had gotten to work with other experienced designers and I loved it. My knowledge of design skyrocketed. I also taught myself responsive web design, more advanced HTML & CSS, Javascript, and light PHP. I was in a frenzy for knowledge. They housed multiple companies and I became the go-to guy for work. Whether it was teaching new people how to create white label sites, designing logos for new products, upcoming print designs, fixing legacy or malfunctioning code, or designing new website landers; I had my hands in many aspects of the company. At some point, they opened a new group of products, called “Nutra”, that I was going to be a large part of. I was in charge of the implementation of outsourced code into our system, fixing errors, and updating the websites with changes after receiving our test results.

The job was great but my skills and responsibilities had grown tremendously. I was approached by another company which offered me a far more generous salary with a product I was much more interested in. I asked iBrand/Quantum Solution to match it but they were unwilling so I left. Sportle, the HUB for online sports streams, Ritzie Williams was on his way!

There were a couple things I wasn’t 100% used to when starting: Startup lingo, agile methodology, Laravel. Those things were the biggest interest to me. Pushing my skills and knowledge. I got to learn about business, growth, marketing, and programming. Development was insanely rough. I had the front-end development down but often times the engineer was swamped with working on the app or other changes. I got to attempt at making some the changes myself. Doing things like pulling data from a JSON file using the MVC Laravel was great to learn. Using source control and Amazon Web Servers... There was so much knowledge I picked up working at this company. I also got to do testing and implementing changes... just so much stuff went down at Sportle which pushed me to become better. I do wish I could have been better and pushed it further but at some point, it ran out of funding and couldn’t afford to keep me around...

Being in the market has been a crazy experience. I started getting entrepreneurial and designing my own products. I took some odd jobs, interviewed with some big companies (Geico, LA Times, Amazon, HULU, Advantage Mailing. CJ Affiliate), started learning Swift, and done a ton of reading on design (upcoming trends, prototyping & wireframing software, etc).

I’ve brought my basketball work ethic into the design field...

I’m sorry this was so long. They won’t normally be this long, I promise, but I wanted to tell my back story a little bit. I still think I focused too much on telling about development more than I did about design but I feel they work so closely together as well as the many forms of design (UX/UI Designer, Product Designer, Creative Director). Don’t worry there will be tons of design talk on here...