Danita Gill

Hello there.  My name is Danita Cook (formerly Gill) and I’m a designer and developer from Seattle, Washington.  I currently work for Amazon as a Principal UX Designer, focused on building out an internal community tool to support Amazon logistics partners.

I began teaching myself design at the age of 10, when I got my first copy of Photoshop.  I had spent a lot of time looking at other people’s design portfolios and many of them had simple, easy to follow Photoshop tutorials.  Graphic design became intertwined with who I was; as a kid, whenever anyone asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I’d tell them that I wanted to create beautiful things.

Eventually, after a couple of years of perusing blogs and the like, I decided that if these folks could have their own blogs, so could I.

As you can imagine, my first few attempts as creating a website consisted mostly of poorly coded iframes and minuscule text. But, I was learning.  I had discovered something I was truly passionate to learn more about.

Through the past 11 years, I have continued to practice both my graphic and web design skills with a variety of personal and professional projects.  After getting my B.A.’s in Business Administration (marketing) and Communicaton from the University of Washington (UW), I was hired on as a visual designer for the UW Athletic Department creative team.  I worked as a designer for 2 years, learning an immense amount about working within a creative team and working in a fast-paced, project-based environment.  You can see my work here.

While working at UW, I helped a friend create and code a website for his startup business.  Through the process, I rediscovered the same passion for web design that I had as a kid.  I also discovered that I had a lot of catching up to do in regards to the world of web development.

In January 2015, I began the Technical Web Design certificate program at the British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT).  The full-time program is a 6 month, intensive course that teaches students a variety of modern web development skills, including the following:

• Wireframing / user interface design
• User experience design
• Responsive design and best practices
• HTML / CSS
• JavaScript
• PHP
• Cross-platform / cross-browser functionality

We put these lessons into practice with several web design projects, which you can view here.

After completing my certificate, I started with the Seattle Seahawks as the lead digital designer and developer.  Though I primarily focused on web development and digital graphic design projects, but I got my hands dirty in several different areas, including video and email marketing.

I then joined Expedia as a product designer on the lodging team (hotels, vacation rentals). I worked for 6 months as a junior product designer before being promoted to senior designer. In addition to my product design work, I joined the design system team on a part time basis to help build our new system from the ground up. This included creating components, design system documentation and process, QA of components in code. I was also responsible for migrating the lodging product to new Progressive Web App platform and on boarding my product team to design system. I championed for design system and product integration, creating a product design/engineering component contribution model. I moved the design system team full time as a lead designer, continuing efforts to scale the system and solve problems across products.

In May 2020, I joined Amazon, where I have worked on teams building products to improve the experience of operations employees and partners. In my time I have moved from Senior to Principal Designer, while driving org-level product strategy.

As I continue along my journey, I continue to pick up additional skills to satisfy my never ending desire to keep learning and trying new things.  To quote the Seahawks, “what’s next?“