Digital Fingerprints: A Career in Pixels

How a decade of crafting digital experiences for others taught me everything I needed to finally build something entirely my own.

A year of wireframes, project plan spreadsheets, countless meetings, and late nights of manually migrating page after page of content, we hit “publish” and released 2 million pixels into the world.

That’s the dramatized version, of course, because for anyone who has ever worked in technology, you know there’s more than just one single button, especially when releasing something like a new website. There's plenty of coordination, like a delicate choreography where designers, developers, and project managers must all hit their marks in perfect sequence—because in the digital world, one mistimed deployment can send your carefully crafted 2 million pixels into chaos.

When I had selected Global Business as a major, I didn’t expect to need to select a second major. A “functional” major is what they called it, if I remember correctly. I knew nothing about marketing prior to selecting it as my “functional” major. Making my way through consumer behavior, market research, and communications, none of these held my attention beyond the class. And let’s be honest, marketing being classified as a “functional” major was also a bit of a joke. Even now, when someone tells me they’re a marketing major, I immediately have endless questions about their interests, passions, what kind of marketing they actually want to do, whether they're more analytical or creative… okay, you get my point.

My senior year, a new class unlocked something in my brain: Marketing 444 Social Media Marketing. Back then, there wasn’t the concept of viral posts or influencer marketing. Social media marketing was in its infancy and it wasn’t any ordinary infant—it was a newborn that had come straight out of the womb holding the latest smart phone and demanding your wifi password.

That class became the catalyst for everything that followed—though the path wasn't immediate or straightforward. After graduating in 2014, I spent months searching for the right opportunity while freelancing for nonprofits and non-governmental organizations, learning to craft digital stories for organizations that needed to make every pixel count on shoestring budgets. When I finally landed a role as a social media manager managing two different brands in-house at a fashion company, I was ready to dive headfirst into the world where strategy met pixels, where every post was a tiny digital fingerprint of a brand's personality.