Jeff Szuc

I am the designer of Bird Academy, an online platform providing self-paced courses for bird enthusiasts of all skill levels. As a user experience designer, I ensure that the site’s content is both structured in a logical and easily understood manner and accessible to all users, including those with additional accessibility requirements. I also make certain that various interface and navigational elements are intuitive and frictionless for the user. On a day-to-day level, this work spans a wide range of tasks: from broad scope projects, such as designing the site’s appearance and style guide, to micro-tasks, such as obsessing over the text that appears in a button, or making sure that, on the back end, all the code is marked up properly for interpretation by screen readers.

In addition to the Bird Academy website, I have designed numerous interactive online educational experiences, including the Wall of Birds Interactive, Flap to the Future, and Beastbox. My work ranges from the design of the overall aesthetic, the structure of content flow, and the animated interactive user-interfaces. In the case of the last two projects, I was also responsible for creating title, background, and character illustrations.

Beyond the Lab

At the rate of about two per summer, I am working on a series of larger-than-life murals of the birds that come to my feeder, the largest being a 15-foot-tall Mourning Dove. Before working at the Lab, I illustrated a four-book-series of children’s books which taught fun animal facts to 5-to-7-year-olds.