About me

I was born in Portland, grew up in Salem, graduated from the University of Oregon in Eugene, and then Essex University in England. Maybe I would have studied UX and web development in college, but the World Wide Web was only getting started. (Yep, that's a photo of me in 1991.)

However, desktop publishing was new. I learned PageMaker in college. I also had a summer job working at the small-town Silverton Appeal-Tribune, where I assembled a weekly broadsheet newspaper with X-acto knives and hot wax. After college, I continued designing broadsheets at the Clackamas Review and Oregon City News (in QuarkXPress), and back then I really wanted to land a job doing anything at The Oregonian. I also taught college-level English for three years. But then I learned HTML/CSS and made my first websites, and everything changed.

My freelance websites led to full-time jobs designing for WebMD, Nike, Moda, and Daimler. The technology and distribution models have changed since that newspaper job in Silverton, but the principles I first learned then remain. Establish a visual hierarchy. Make things findable and legible. Use negative space as a style and a device. Typography matters. Avoid needless fanfare. Write well. Don’t frustrate people. No matter where we go from here, our users will need meaningful content, information architecture, UX strategies, and graphic design.

I like to stay on top UX and design thinking — books from Smashing, A Book Apart, New Riders, Rockport, UXPin, and O'Reilly are among my favorites. I enjoy cycling in Portland, skiing at Timberline, and hiking in the Columbia River Gorge. I’ll scan menus in restaurants, but I almost always order a burger and fries. And while I'm not against IPAs, I'll take mine dark and malt-forward.

(Photography is one of my favorite pasttimes — view my photo portfolio at Wederquist360.com).