Hi! I’m Mark Tang, I’m 35 years old and I live in Tucson, Arizona. These days, most of my energy is spent on two things.
- Raising my daughter
- Design work
If you’re on my website reading this, you’re probably here for the design work, so let’s talk about it.
I’ve been designing for about 11 years, having started my first job in 2014 at an ad agency in Singapore. I’ve gone from advertising to motion graphics, brand design, and now UX work. The field of design is a wide array of related activities, and my practice has covered more of them than most designers I know. This doesn’t make me better, it just makes me me.
When I started out, I was spending all day editing images in Photoshop and making layouts in Illustrator — just thinking about masks, adjustment layers, the pen tool, and stuff like that. Then I got into After Effects and Blender, which made me contend with 2 additional dimensions of space and time. Fancier ways of organizing information like parenting, rigging, expressions, and compositions became necessary to coordinate objects in motion and in 3D space.
I was also doing brand design. Where if you get it just right, the custom packaging, website, and bespoke client gift come together to create a vibe. Creating a brand identity often felt like the design equivalent of a triathlon. I enjoyed the process of not just crafting the logo, but fitting it into this curated experience of typography, styles and colors; executing the brand identity through a website, video, or print application — and then documenting all of it in the brand guidelines.
All of this eventually led me to working in startups, where I’ve been refreshing brand identities, creating product videos, building websites, and designing apps. These days most of my time is spent designing my company’s app in Figma, and building their website in Webflow. My current work obsession is design systems. Catch me at a party, and I’d happily talk your ear off about the best way to name colors, or all the things that go into building a button component.
What kind of person have I become after doing this job for as long as I have? What does it mean to have spent a third of my adult life staring at a screen, thinking about text and images? Overall, I’m grateful for is the life my design practice has allowed me to live. I am a self-sustaining independent adult. I get to spend every day with the 2 people I love the most. I have a really cool keyboard.