Andy Wong

My path into design has taken a few turns.

After advertising portfolio school in Atlanta, I interned briefly at Y&R in San Francisco, then spent four years at an environmental consulting firm. Not the obvious path for an art director, but I wanted work that felt like it mattered. Eventually the pull toward craft won out. I moved to New York, joined a boutique agency, and spent four-plus years on advertising and brand work for clients across tech, insurance, and publishing, including EFI, Chubb, and St. Martin's Press. Later I was part of the team behind Guardian Life Insurance's first rebrand in 158 years and the JLL/HFF national merger rebrand.

During COVID, when work slowed down, I started playing with Adobe XD just to see what I could make. It was the most fun I'd had with design in years, and it pointed toward something I hadn't considered: product design.

I'd looked at UX once before and written it off. The research, the personas, the frameworks felt like a long detour away from actual design work. But I found out UI-focused roles existed, took a course at CareerFoundry, and got hired at Vibrant Emotional Health.

The first two years were primarily UI — some IA, occasional UX work, but mostly conceiving and executing the designs myself. Then I got pulled into research. It changed my thinking completely. Watching someone struggle with something you designed, understanding obstacles they can't always articulate: it makes you better. What I'd avoided turned out to be the thing that makes the work mean something.

The environmental firm. The non-profit work. Vibrant. Turns out the thread was there the whole time.

More recently, I've started using Claude Code for personal projects like this site, and to bring ideas to my team quickly as functional demos instead of static comps — including a virtual bubble wrap app to help keep users in distress distracted.