Catherine Baird - Dashboard

Name: Catherine Baird
Company: Dashboard

Catherine Baird is currently an Associate Creative Director at Dashboard. She's worked at Dashboard for the past 2 years, after working at Ecentricarts, Henderson Bas, and even 5eme Gauche in France. She studied art and art history in university before graduating from the same program at Sheridan in 2001.

While at Dashboard, she has worked on some pretty cool things from advertising the new ING Direct chequing account to rebranding Toronto's Santa Claus Parade.

Although she specializes in interactive design, Catherine stressed the fact that we will need to possess many more skills than just web design in our future jobs. She explained that every project description will be different, and we'll need to be able to adapt to these changes.

She clearly laid out 5 steps we should take to be successful:

1. Be a really, really good designer.
In the end, we want to get design jobs and need to have varied design skills. This should be our focus; we shouldn't become overwhelmed with new technologies.

2. Understand (and love) technology.
We need to know how it works and be excited about new technologies that will enhance our designs (e.g. touch screens).

3. Learn video, Flash animation, and social media.
Having these skills will enable us to do better work and it's important to be able to create video and animated content. We also need to take time to understand how advertising can effectively extend into social media, and especially learn how to design for Facebook.

4. Understand what UX and IA are.
User experience and information architecture are vital - you need to know what the user's experience will be before you start designing what it will look like.

5. Work hard, be flexible and keep up.
Every project will be different from the last.

Each of these steps are things that I will definitely keep in mind as I move forward, as well as my favourite piece of advice she gave which is "do what you love and be inspired".