My family is a football family. I am not. What actually fascinated me as a kid was the broadcast itself, more specifically the glowing first down line laid over real grass, and the motion graphics for stat cutaways and player intros. I'd sit there playing with it in my head, trying to figure out how the designers layered footage over stills, how those glossy shapes moved and broke apart between plays and commercials, like it was a toy I could take apart and rebuild.

That mindset is still a lot of how I design; scavenging corners of the internet, looking at shop advertising while traveling, and of course a Steelers game I wasn't even trying to watch as a kid. When I know I can't build something on my own yet, I take it apart in my head just to play with the pieces.

Living in DC means I have seen rendition after rendition of the same projection-room exhibition, ticketed at $30 and advertised to me countless times on Instagram.

The technology that creates these rooms is very cool. And that's about where the experience ends. I've read reviews that complain that once you've digested the art, there's not much else that your ticket buys, and it frustrates me as a designer because these inspired works (often Van Gogh or Monet) provide so much room to generate concrete, engaging experiences outside of just spectacle.

I think about design a lot like ceramics. The first step is just getting the big mound of clay onto the wheel, something to actually push against, and only then do you slowly work it toward its shape.

When I sculpt, I sculpt fast. Changes need to move at the same speed as my mind, before the idea slips away. I make a lot of small moves in short bursts, and they add up into something cohesive, until I hit that sense of contentment I'm always chasing in a design.

Being a student with a plethora of big, big ideas, and little means of time, money, and resources is quite the challenge as a creative. But it's taught me to be scrappy, and that most design problems, digital or physical, are solvable if you think hard enough about how to approach them.

Software stops being a limitation once you know how to combine the right shapes and colors into something more complex, and full experiential builds are possible if you're willing to scavenge the halls, backrooms, and occasionally the dumpsters of a college campus.