About
I am a designer living in Oregon with my partner, kiddos, and chickens. I spend my working hours on client projects, designing typefaces, building prototypes, and checking on sourdough to make sure it's rising.
I've managed designers and developers over the years and believe that improving the working quality of life of my collaborators drives better outcomes for users and the business.
Contact
Reach me via email at mariah@tabletalk.studio.
Principles
The paint never dries on the web
A common refrain I use to remind my team that this medium is ephemeral and the very nature of it can change rapidly. It's a surface that is ripe for experimentation and is evolving all the time. Like painting actual walls, however, no amount of pretty colors or expensive paint will hide a poorly prepped surface—slow performance, rickety tech stacks, and bad user experience will turn that lovely Dribbble shot into a site that just doesn't work.
AI Pragmatism
AI is a tool, like any other—refusing to engage at all is antithetical to our responsibilities as designers to create the future we believe in. We can't create the future without engaging with the present and understanding the past.
I currently use AI to build better processes, help me move through discovery efficiently, analyze research and data, and prototype (or build, this site is an example of that). As a designer with a frontend background, I've used AI to spend more time building than I was able to before. I can communicate intent to stakeholders, PMs, and engineers with higher fidelity and clarity than ever before. Under increasingly pressurized timelines, this makes more time to craft our experiences, edge cases, unhappy paths, and accessibility with intention—shifting refinement left.
While I do have Claude open most of the time, these words are all my own and you will find me having conversations that are critical of AI. Ask me about the economics of this technology, that impact of data center creation (and where we chose to put them), legal ramifications on IP consumed (and the implications of selling AI outputs), and my perceptions of the actual utility vs marketed utility. Critical thinking is a part of design as a practice and when I stop using that muscle, I'll retire to tend my garden and chickens full-time.
People are the point
Not sure this needs a ton of detail. As designers, holding this truth close helps us to improve the products and features we create for our users and design better processes internally that support people in doing their best work.