megan␥GALBRAITH␥DONAHUE
APPS
MURAL
WORK
PLUNGE DATA
YARN PAINTING
PRODUCT
DESIGN
LEADERSHIP
When I was a child, my dad brought home our first PC computer, firing up Prodigy and handing me some disks that held a copy of “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?”… I was instantly hooked. But when PrintShop Companion appeared, this machine turned magical — not only could I print my own cards and posters, but I could design my own 8-bit graphics in a little 16x16 (ish) rectangle of pixels I could toggle on and off. Mind = blown.
In 8th grade, I had to write a program using BASIC for a class at school. I illustrated programmatically a visual storybook about a trip to Paris.
10 GOTO PARIS
20 STOP.
OK it had a lot more to it than that — the Eiffel Tower, some baguettes, a shopping bag. You could almost taste the macarons through the screen, I swear it. I got to record movies with green screens and made a very big animated hit starring my McNugget Buddies and a few Barbies… music by C+C Music Factory. You can’t make this stuff up.
The first program I wrote did little more than turn every font on my terminal into
Giant, Lime Green Letters
Which I found very exciting and a little terrifying. I hadn’t realized I could just change the machine. What power!
In college, I had access to fast internet and my own computer. I started building web pages, writing HTML by hand and designing custom landing page artwork with a bootleg copy of Photoshop.
I did this for friends, my rowing team, and ultimately landed my first research role at the MIT Media Lab, developing and maintaining the team website for the Tangible Media Group, led by Prof. Hiroshi Ishii.
But, across the hall sat another team which caught my eye: the Aesthetics + Computation Group, led by Prof. John Maeda. This team expressed beauty through pixels in ways my lime-green shaded eyes had not yet dared to dream. I knew I needed to work with them!
ACG became the home of my graduate research in computational design. I wrote a thesis that explored building programming tools for fashion designers and artists not familiar with hardware, sensor and software development.
BACKSTORY
AI
DEVELOPMENT
INNOVATION
VISION
After school, I dug into the guts of iPods, crafted the beauty of Windows Phone, and ensured millions of Creative Professionals could work more efficiently in their Adobe products than ever before.
I worked with the creative teams for Magic: the Gathering, to help them execute operational and workflow gains at scale as they became a $1billion business. And now, I’m exploring what’s next while running a small design agency.
As I look ahead to the future, I am excited. In fact, I haven’t been this excited about the merging of computation and design since my days hunkered down in the Media Lab, writing code and listening to Radiohead while the snow fell outside my window…
AI has unlocked workflow magic like nothing before. My dusty coding skills got whipped back into shape in DAYS. I went from not writing code for 20 years to building multiple new websites, shipping two iPhone apps, hooking up backend databases, and way more than I thought possible to do in a year. It makes me feel joy about all the upheaval happening in my industry, not fear.
Please enjoy bopping around my website and looking at my work. I will be posting more as I continue to develop again!
Reach out over LinkedIn if you’d like to connect: to collaborate on projects, talk about all the good, bad and ugly about AI, to learn about my cold plunging habit, or to offer me a job. ☺︎
Thanks for reading this far!
␥ MEGAN
TAKING IT FORWARD
&
OPERATIONS
STRATEGIC
EXCELLENCE
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