Hi! Welcome to the online home of Bernadette Smith—designer, developer, marketer, manifesting generator, and still-aspiring entrepreneur.

Biography

A life’s work of embracing both the creative and the quantitative, balancing leadership and learning in all my personal and professional endeavors.

I have spent my entire adult life—and most of my (loner) childhood—engrossed in design and the impact it has on the way we communicate and connect with each other. As a somewhat free-spirited (awkward) child—I found sanctuary in the online world, and a freedom of expression through color, typography and layout.

In high school, I founded a Wu-Tang fan club on GeoCities, establishing the site as a preeminent social network that attracted hundreds of monthly visitors. I quickly became enamored with all things design and development on the (then new) medium. The site was eventually abandoned as my interest in Wu-Tang waned (along with the shutting down of GeoCities), but a passion for online community and design remained. Twenty years, dozens of projects, and several ‘lessons learned’ later, I’m still as obsessed as ever.

While pursuing a Bachelor’s Degree in—you guessed it—Graphic Design, I was working full-time as a marketing coordinator at a Seattle-based architecture firm, where I designed the company’s brand guide and marketing collateral. This helped the company create a strong brand identity and voice, and maintain an image of professionalism. This is also where I fell in love with my newest obsession—marketing.

Most recently, I spent nine years at DPR Construction, a global construction company based in California. As an early employee in the Austin, Texas office (the headcount grew 5x during my tenure), I helped build a $350M operation to a $1B business unit (literally from the ground up), and grow a regional marketing team from one to five professionals across three offices.

I currently reside in Seattle and own and operate my own web design company. I have a sincere appreciation of good design, which plays a major role in every facet of my life, bordering on obsessive (hence the name of my company, Swatch Junkie). I also volunteer with several non-profit organizations; it allows me to use my technical skills to contribute to a good cause, which is incredibly rewarding.

Expertise

With 15+ years of hands-on experience, I’ve learned and embraced modern design + marketing through a continual loop of trial and error of almost every ‘technique’ imaginable, yielding a diverse skillset that touches on most every function. This is a partial list.

Resume

Portfolio

Inbound Marketing
Content Strategy & Execution
Conversion Rate Optimization
Digital Video
Email Marketing, Design & Dev
Social Media
SEO/SEM
Media Planning & Buying

Website Design & Development
Visual (UI/UX) Design
Editorial Design
Copywriting (Ad, Web & Proposal)
Tradeshow & Event Planning
Budgeting
Business Development/Sales
Community Outreach

Technical Skills

UI / UX (Adobe XD, Figma, Sketch) 80% 80%
Adobe Creative Suite (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign) 90% 90%
Front-End Development (HTML, CSS & JS) 60% 60%
WordPress 80% 80%
Microsoft Office 365 / G Suite 90% 90%
Project Management (Trello, Wrike, Slack) 90% 90%

Contact

Let’s talk. Tell me something about yourself. I’ll start: I love learning about new technology & I’m super into astrology, tarot and crystals. Ok, your turn…

Not in the mood to fill out a form? You can write to hi.swatchjunkie@gmail.com.