Grace Tianmeizi graduated from university in 2019, just months before the global pandemic changed life as we knew it. With such a short time to get herself a good job and started on a career pathway, Grace found Upwork was the perfect way to to find work and gain experience during the months of lockdown.
Born in China, Grace now lives in San Francisco Bay. She studied at the University in Missouri as an Undergraduate – with Maths as her major and graphic design. Later she attended graduate school in San Francisco where she studied Jewellery Design and Web design.
She has always loved many types of art – including sculpture – and soon realised that giving a preference to maths, had probably not been the ideal choice for her. She found herself wondering what to do on the career front as she was pulled strongly by her love of art. Although she had thoroughly enjoyed jewellery making and was good at it, she could not see how it would make an ideal career in San Francisco Bay.
One of her professors at college had once mentioned Upwork to Grace as she herself regularly finds interesting jobs on the platform to complete in her spare time. After much heart searching, Grace found herself being drawn to a profession that combined maths, technology and creativity and thought that the ideal way to ‘test the waters’ would be to get some freelance work.
Grace applied for several jobs on Upwork seeking UX/ UI designers and website designers and soon found herself working on the home page for a HR Connection company. Several jobs followed that were coincidentally with similar companies and she found the work both challenging and satisfying. Some months later, the first company she worked for, contacted Grace again, requesting that she worked with them on their main product page.
Why Upwork?
Having heard about Upwork through her professor, it was a natural progression for Grace to try out the platform for herself. After the different periods of lockdown and a number of jobs successfully completed through Upwork, Grace was able to secure a full time position with a design agency which she is thoroughly enjoying. She is working with clients on a range of projects, including one that she has found particularly rewarding as it is using animation to make maths easy for Key Stage 2 children. As Grace says with a smile ‘ it is the perfect combination.’Grace goes on to explain how she felt about signing up with Upwork-
‘As a designer, it was super easy to sign up on Upwork, since I had a polished resume and professional design portfolio before landing on Upwork. I just added my skill sets and job experiences and then I was ready to apply for the UX/UI design jobs I want to work on’.
Certainly, Grace views the experience that she gained working with Upwork clients as invaluable. She reflects on how she lacked confidence in the early days to tell clients that their ideas would sadly not be ideal for their website but today, she confidently explains to them how she can take their idea and adapt it so that will be successful. She cites the example of how her thoughts on the web pages teaching children maths have changed. In the beginning, she used large, bright fonts to attract and keep the children’s’ attention, but has since found that children are also attracted to much smaller fonts and short, direct text that contains an interesting idea or fact.
What are the attributes needed for your work?
Grace is a perfectionist, who spends many hours getting her work exactly as she wants it, but she suggests that being a ‘people person and a good listener’ are key character traits for her profession. She explains that she listens to her clients’ ideas and then interprets them graphically. Her patience is tested because she is discussing subjective ideas with her clients and her interpretation of them may not be quite what her clients had in mind, so it can sometimes be a case of ‘backing to the drawing board’!
‘Over the past three years, I have worked with over 15+ clients, start-up companies, large corporations, and product owners.
At the beginning of my career, I gained and lost my confidence as it depended on clients’ feedback on my design. All negative feedback affected my emotion because I took all the design criticisms personally. This changed when I started working at K12, I met my manager, and she was a great mentor who encouraged me and gave me plenty of confidence’.
Grace has also learned that it can be really beneficial to invite clients to become teammates so that they can be involved in the project-
‘Many clients are willing to help with the design process. They know the target market and their users better than anyone. All the information is available as practical design resources. My teammates are professional and caring. Every time I needed help, they always offered to help and have given me valuable suggestions.
She also recommends that you –
Stop taking any feedback personally and really concentrate on the users/clients’ core needs, and maintaining efficient communication to improve workflow’.
Grace certainly loves the challenge and variety her work brings her and for this reason, regularly attends online course to keep herself current on new trends and fashions. She designs website pages and software for HR compensation software companies, as a UX/UI Designer and is currently working for Stride (K12) online E-learning software company, as a visual designer, where she is busy designing maths classes for 2nd-grade students- a job that she is particularly enjoying.
Grace really appreciated the variety of jobs available on Upwork and the fact that she could find ones that matched her skill set perfectly-
I am always willing to learn new things. For my current job, for example, I have had opportunities to sharpen my animation skills and comprehend coding languages.
Grace has found that she really liked her daily time frame when she worked with Upwork clients-
‘60% of the time, I designed online courses on web builder tools and used coding to check layouts and style accuracy. 30% of the time, was spent focusing on animation and illustration design. Only 10% of my time was spent on meetings and management.
‘My daily schedule was super flexible, and I decided whenever I wanted to start working and log off the day. It was an excellent benefit for night owl people like me and suits me perfectly now that I have a full -time day job.’
She loves the company of others, but is delighted that she began her working life working for Upwork remotely with only herself to set the working pace. She laughs when she describes her work today –
‘We still all work remotely, but come together for occasional team meetings, but after starting my working life working remotely, this feels normal to me’.
Determined to keep her work/ life balance perfect, Grace tries not to work at weekends and enjoys getting out and about visiting new places – but knows that half her mind is looking for inspiration! Now that she has a settled work routine, she is using Upwork to get some extra part-time work that will help her to expand her portfolio. She is full of praise for Upwork because she is able to easily control how much or how little extra work she gets and this can be altered easily, month by month, by the number of jobs she applies for. As Grace explains with a smile – ‘it is a win-win situation for me’….
Grace’s website is :https://tianmeizi.webflow.io/
