About
ALANA WATERS-PIPER
About
Hi! My name is Alana Waters-Piper and I’m an Interactive Creative Director in the Chicago area. I have about 18 years in design, much of that time in interactive, many of those years in agencies, though I do have in-house experience as well.
If I had to give you the elevator speech, I’d quickly run through the fact that I’ve worked on everything from an international identity roll out for Enron to managing the primary packaging, POP, and line extensions for the Dove and Degree brands while at Unilever. I’ve designed and managed interactive projects for clients such as Walgreens, Sears, Disney, Sony, and even His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet.
My father is the sort of guy who prefers to build his own electronics and is a big fan of soldering together circuit boards in his free time. He’s a pilot and meteorologist, recently retired from the FAA. My mother, a one-time elected judge in the State of Texas, is very creative. She paints, photographs, and runs her own antique & gift shop. So that’s the short story of how I came to be one-half geek and one-half artist. (I should insert that my father is also an accomplished photographer or I’ll hear about it later.)
When “web design” came to be a real job, I hopped on board without giving it a second thought. All these years later, I honestly don’t know what else I would have done. I enjoy just about every aspect of this work. Working through the site map and wire frame stage is invigorating. I love figuring out how people will best access what they need out of a site. I’m equally happy working through the design process. I do not believe that you have to sacrifice design to make a site work hard. Beautiful, hard-working, functional, and solving problems for the client that hadn’t even occurred to them…That’s why I’m still doing this.
I’m very adept at bridging the gap between the client, creative and development teams. I communicate in a way that doesn’t talk down to the client, yet they feel informed and included in the project.
In some cases I am quite capable of taking a site from concept to launch, but prefer to work in the company of a team. There have been times where I have sculpted a character from clay, photographed him in a tabletop studio, put the shot into the layout, and coded everything from soup-to-nuts. There are times when you need those tools in house. Either there isn’t time or there isn’t budget to send it to a vendor. I like knowing those tools are in my kit.
I believe in beautiful design solutions, due diligence, strong process, and proper roll out. I know how to separate the subjective discussions from the functional and keep those 2 conversations moving so that we end up with a hard-working design that honors the Form Follows Function methodology, yet is gorgeous and engaging.