Some people take the direct route.
I took the scenic one.
I grew up in Nova Scotia, spent 15 years in Halifax building a career in editorial design, taught hundreds of people to work with their dogs, competed on the national agility circuit — and then, deliberately, and with both hands on the wheel, packed everything up and moved to Vancouver.
Fresh start. No safety net. The whole road ahead.
That was the plan: pivot to UX, build something new, find out what I was capable of when I stopped doing the thing I was a little too comfortable with.
For 16 years I was a graphic designer at Nimbus Publishing, the largest book publisher in Atlantic Canada. My job was to take someone’s 400-page manuscript and distil it into a single image that could stop a stranger mid-browse, tell them exactly what kind of experience they were in for, and make them want to pick it up.
No caption. No explanation. Just design doing its job.
Covers went through months of feedback — editors, marketing, sales, buyers, distributors — while interiors had to be locked in two weeks. I learned to hold both timelines in my head without losing either. Twenty-one of my titles won or were nominated for major awards. I was proud of the work. And then I wanted more.
Parallel to all of that, I was running a dog-training business. Happy Hooligans K9 Training started in 2015 as a side project and grew into something I was genuinely devoted to — teaching agility classes, working with hundreds of handlers across Atlantic Canada, eventually re-establishing in Vancouver.
What I learned fast is that no training plan survives first contact with a distracted dog, a nervous handler, or both at once. You could hand someone a perfect protocol, and if it didn’t account for them — their timing, their anxiety, their relationship with their dog — it was worthless.
So I stopped handing people scripts and started designing around the individual in front of me. I’d figure out where the friction was, and rebuild around what they actually needed. The plan had to fit the person. Not the other way around.
I didn’t know it then, but I was already doing UX.
The pivot
I enrolled at Emily Carr University of Art + Design in the fall of 2025, and I won’t pretend it was entirely comfortable. Going back to school, in a new city, with a blank professional slate — that’s the kind of thing that either breaks you or clarifies you.
It clarified me.
Turns out, going back to school in your forties with fifteen years of professional experience behind you is actually a pretty good move. I already knew how to take hard feedback without unravelling, collaborate across teams, and look at something that wasn’t working and explain why — not just sense that it felt off. More than once, I ended up being the one classmates turned to when projects stalled or teams lost direction — which, it turns out, is also design work. The program gave me vocabulary for instincts I’d been running on for years. The diploma was new. The judgment wasn’t.
Looking ahead
I’m looking for a UX/UI or product design role where thoughtful craft, sharp communication, and real empathy are part of the work — somewhere that values people who’ve learned things the long way.
If that sounds like where you’re heading, let’s talk.
Let’s Talk