As a designer and UX architect at Palantir, Ashley works to create beautiful, usable, and accessible websites that help users more easily find the information and tools they need and allow our clients to communicate their messages effectively with their users. She received her BA in Visual Communication from Loyola University Chicago where she also worked on brand extensions to their award-winning identity system, creating advertisements for national publications and various print and web materials.
Things to Know
If Ashley could only watch one movie for the rest of time, it would be any Wes Anderson movie. She’s in love with the way he frames scenes, and all the ones she has seen are so visually interesting. What makes her laugh the hardest are those times when everyone is laughing, but no one really knows why. The laughter and absurdity take off and before you know it people are laughing so hard they are crying and can't take a breath.
Though this isn't that embarrassing in the grand scheme of things, the most embarrassing thing that ever happened to Ashley has stuck with her to this day as a crystal clear memory: “It happened when I was in 2nd grade. We had a substitute teacher who decided to do a ‘get to know you’ questionnaire. On it was a question asking ‘What's your favorite song?’ I was attempting to joke around with my friends and wrote ‘The ABCs’. I should note, that wasn't a 'cool' song at the time, but my friends thought it was funny in the typical ‘we don't care about this joke of an assignment’ sort of way. We had already graduated to listening to pop music and the radio. I should also note that I happened to know this teacher as she lived in my neighborhood and my siblings and I often played with her son.
Little did I know when I wrote those words that she was going to ‘randomly’ select some of us to sing our favorite songs. Well guess who got picked *randomly* first! So up I go and I try to start singing. I then start to laugh so hard at the ridiculousness of this situation and paired with my nervousness, I start to cry from it. Now my whole class and the substitute teacher all think I'm ACTUALLY crying from sadness. So the teacher calls me over and then gives me a kiss on my head (remember, I knew her well) and a shoulder pat basically saying ‘it's okay’. But really, this just made it worse because all my friends saw it! I attribute this story to why I get stage fright!”
Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.
