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Howdy, folks.
My name is Leigh Larson, pronounced ‘Lee’ like Bruce Lee but no relation (but what a turn of events for my student loans if there was!).
I was that girl in middle school who spent hours on her Myspace profile, learning internet design and function. At the University of Texas at Austin, my college Powerpoints were beyond what any reasonable slide deck should be for a 5-minute presentation. After I got out of the Air Force, one of my roles was managing the social media and website for my non-profit employer. Tired of being broke and not honoring my own gifts of making the computer do what I want (some people are just born #blessed), I left public service to attend the accredited Turing School of Software Engineering and Design in Denver.
And oh, baby, was that the right call. I led a team to win the senior school competition in front of potential-employer judges and was hired 3 weeks before graduation (during COVID, and the presidential election! My lucky stars.). I started as a front-end developer, which means that a designer mocks-up a design, I build/code it into existence, and the user sees and interacts with what I built. I excelled at this, and was also quick to make connections between design and function. I recognized how patterns and design rules affected the placement of buttons, images, links, texts for optimal use by the user on the website, and how bad design forces bad usership and lost consumership. Under a former Google product manager and a Verizon UX designer lead, I got a masterclass on how to make a beautiful and functional website and mobile app.
Then, that designer got poached by a bigger fish with deeper pockets, right as we were just starting to plan a new feature for the app/website. I had seen his proposed mock-ups, and to be honest, I wasn’t a fan. I knew the functional code intimately, having been Bobbette the Builder on it, and had worked so much with the design team on the form, I asked upper management if I could take a shot at combining my current coding role with the design role to design and build the new feature.
So, I did. And that design and app would go on to win awards in Design and Function categories in our emergency-preparedness communications industry niche. The design and function are easy to use so that they maximize lives saved during active shooter, inclement weather, and fire and bomb scenarios in school districts and college campuses across the United States. I loved using my tech powers for good, and would later design the marketing materials for a medical imaging software company that used AI to detect and diagnose cancers at a fraction of the current human error or misdiagnosis rate.
Affirmed by the reception of my design talent, I started creativeLeigh Digital as a side hustle in 2021. I have worked with clients of all varieties – oil and gas, medical and AI venture capitalists, skincare, law, you name it. I loved the Rockies but wasn’t wild about big cities so I moved to Great Falls, MT, and eventually grew my side hustle into a full-time job. I also expanded into designing Great Falls, MT merchandise for corporate gifts and wholesale around town.
Listen – I want to increase your profits by upgrading your branding, social media and website. As long as I’m making transactions happen for my clients, I’m doing my job.
You are the expert on your business, let me be the expert on the design-side of your digital and print presence. If you think the cost of good design is high, you should see the cost of bad design.
See y’all around the Falls,
Leigh
@creativeleighdigital