A designer with vision
Madyson Designs is the per­sonal port­fo­lio and blog of Sarah Whin­nem. The web­site came about as a grad­u­a­tion assign­ment for my BFA in Visual Com­mu­ni­ca­tion. I have since com­pleted my degree and have been work­ing in the web and design field for eight years.  This site has since gone through sev­eral redesigns cul­mi­nat­ing in the design you see today. My free­lance work is cur­rently han­dled out of my office in Man­ches­ter, Connecticut.

The work stuff
I am cur­rently employed with ING USA, in the Retire­ment Ser­vices Mar­ket­ing depart­ment in a team of graphic design­ers. Here, I work mainly on print col­lat­eral for retire­ment plan man­agers and con­sumers, with the occa­sional email and Flash design thrown in. I was pre­vi­ously employed by Ther­mo­Spas, Inc. where I worked on every­thing from printed brochures and mar­ket­ing mate­ri­als, to web­sites and blogs, to prod­uct pack­ag­ing, to sig­nage and envi­ron­men­tal design. Prior to that, I was with Fron­tier Vision Tech­nolo­gies in New­ing­ton, Con­necti­cut as a project man­ager. There, I over­saw the devel­op­ment of dynamic web­sites from con­cept­ing to com­ple­tion, man­ag­ing design and devel­op­ment tasks to ensure timely and qual­ity com­ple­tion of projects. I also han­dled much of the in-office graph­i­cal work rang­ing from print to multimedia.

The per­sonal stuff
I’ve just recently got­ten the blog­ging bug, but have been a con­nois­seur of all things geek since mid­dle school when my father first brought home an ‘IBM com­pat­i­ble’ something-or-other to play around with. I took it apart, and took apart pretty much every other piece of equip­ment that refused to work or that was unfor­tu­nate enough to be inter­est­ing to me. I broke some stuff, but mostly was able to fig­ure out how to fix things. I was cured of this obses­sion after tak­ing a job at a tech repair desk in a large retail store which will go unnamed.

Since then, I have been focused on the ‘pretty’ aspects of the tech world– I love beau­ti­ful websites, beautiful fonts, and beau­ti­ful soft­ware. I’ve been a designer for eight years now and have a day job where I can really enjoy myself and flex my cre­ative mus­cles, so to speak. In my spare time, though, I can’t resist my inner geek and find myself tak­ing apart bro­ken watches, fol­low­ing @wilw on Twit­ter, and play­ing Dig­gna­tion drink­ing games.