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 purely UI. Then I got pulled into research — and 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.