Brandon Pickett is the lead UI designer at Modern. Initially he as a person confused me because I had never imagined or really thought of what a designer that is also a suburban father is like, fortunately Brandon popped up in our teams meeting and showed me exactly that looks like. Brandon Pickett showed us a great breadth of his work in his portfolio and I was kind of surprised at how wide the spectrum of design work you are given is for a UI UX designer, things like advertisements for Truck Month is something that I would never have associated with UI UX but now it strangely makes a lot of sense to me. It was nice getting to listen to him speak about his career and his work as I am interested in UI UX design in the future and getting to listen to someone who has been doing a lot of work in this specific field was extremely beneficial to my understanding of what it means to be a UI UX designer and the kind of work that I could be doing. What I really took away from this talk was the idea that we should never stop learning and to keep up with things in the world. Even though Brandon is an Alumni of the program by many years he is very well informed and seems to keep learning things on his own which makes him invaluable in the way that he stays on top of things. One part that really stuck out to me was the way that he talked about not knowing much about the field going into it and when it came to working with others more knowledgeable about it than he was he would ask them for help and used that as a way to learn more. If he knew that he was going to talk to someone more knowledgeable he would go forth and do some of his own preliminary research and at least get terms to ask so that he can learn more and not approach them with general questions. Brandon knew exactly what he wanted to learn more about and used it to learn precisely that without wasting the more knowledgeable persons time. Another thing that really stuck with me is that this person is a suburban father in the design field and while that may not be a crazy thing to other people. I think that seeing this is helpful to me in giving me a bit of something to shoot for in my future where I myself am a suburban dad working as a designer rather than this imagery of young hipster designers dominating the field along with cut throat agency directors.
