my name is Ulrike. I’m a designer with a focus on branding, web design, and visual design. I’m based in Berlin, but open to remote work. I have experience working at an agency, as a freelancer, with startups and large-scale corporations.

Agency Work

I joined the Berlin-based creative agency Us_ at the start of 2019. I was looking to develop my skills by working in a team of creatives, and learning about how agencies work with clients and on several projects at once on a bigger scale than I had previously experienced it as a freelancer. My goal was to become a more well-rounded designer by taking on diverse tasks in different fields of work inside the agency.

As a result of my work with Us_ my visual design skills have been improved, and I have learned a great deal about client communication, content curation, and the final delivery of a project. My main focus during the first months was branding and web design.

My early projects included an update of the website design for Planet, a satellite data company, and the development of a new branding system for Glutamat, a growing content agency. I also helped craft a complete brand identity and website design for Skill Yoga, an early stage startup establishing yoga as a secondary sport for athletes, and executed a website redesign for SUN, a growing student network. Additionally I created illustrations and graphic assets for other clients including Mimi Hearing Technologies, PravaTB and EuCanCan.

Working with Rasa

I spent two years working for Rasa, a startup making open source tools to build AI assistants. I was hired as operations manager, but additionally to this job I designed branding and marketing assets for the company, helped to maintain their website and occasionally planned events. Some of my most important work for them included designing the company mascot, creating a logo and shirt for a big developer event held by Rasa, and handling the production, storage and fulfilment of all Rasa merchandise.

Working with Rasa helped me become more organised and goal-oriented in my work. I got to grow and learn about communication between developers and designers in a small but diverse team, I got to know my strengths and aspirations more in-depth, and at the end of my time there was able to formulate a better idea of what kind of designer I wanted to be.

UI / UX Design

My experience with UI/UX has been mostly around website projects, however I am working on two personal UI/UX centered app projects right now. One of them is a concept for a sleeker, more easy to access doodle alternative. The other is based in the sharing economy and sustainability space, aiming to make use of existing infrastructure in our cities to bring people together in an interesting way and enable them to utilise resources more carefully.

13 Rules for Conversational User Interface Design

I wrote my bachelor’s thesis on the design of conversational user interfaces. Based on the eight golden rules for interface design by Ben Shneiderman, I compiled a set of rules that is tailored to designing conversational user interfaces. I hope that the resulting guidelines can contribute to the simplification of the design process and help surmount the multitude of design challenges associated with the rise of chatbots and natural user interfaces.

I condensed the thesis into a medium post and gave a talk on the topic at the Bots Berlin Meetup.

Illustration and Graphic Design

With a background in analogue illustration and graffiti, I always try to produce original illustrations and graphic design assets for projects when possible. Some of my favourite projects include medical illustrations for PravaTB, front cover illustrations for a set of notebooks for a gift shop called Rhyme and Reason, blog header images for Elevada, illustrations for and design of a brochure for the employers’ association Nordostchemie and a variety of personal projects.