Pani Fooladvand is a Senior Experience Design Manager at T-Mobile. She’s one of our favorite grads (Class of 2016). Originally from Iran, she took a chance on Seattle when her fiancé got a job opportunity here. The move was supposed to be a temporary adventure in this world traveler’s life, but they fell in love with the Pacific Northwest and ended up getting married in Kerry Park at the top of Queen Anne Hill.

Holly Robins and Holly Torneby are a design duo that met during their time at Seattle Central Creative Academy. Their newly created Salthouse Studios offers a nimble and experienced approach to creating for clients anything from identity to web development. Graduating from the design program they knew they were going to have to “work hard to turn a creative passion into a career”.

A visual designer at Hewlett-Packard, Nathan Lincoln has been doing design work in Seattle since graduating from SCCA in 2013. A visual designer with in the User Experience department, we chatted with him about his life as a designer.

Graphic Designer Joyce Hwang combines a love of illustration with local-focused book design work and engagement in the community. We sat down with this 2013 graduate of SCCA’s design program to hear about what she has been doing.

Graduating from the design program in 2014, Margaret Darcher has already had her hands on a number of large projects through her work at Amazon. Her work within the Kindle marketing department and most recently a project about the Dash button, a small device that connects to your account to reorder items at the push of a…well, button. We talked with her in depth about the work she does.

Brit Zerbo fell into graphic design work. Always a creative—using multimedia, painting, collaging—and a child of the internet Zerbo says “didn’t know I wanted to be a designer until school.” By the time she completed the Graphic Design program at Seattle Central in Spring 2014 she had clearly found  creative home in the design world. “That was the moment when I felt like I was at the exact right place at the exact right time. You hit those moments in your life and you think this is exactly what I am supposed to be doing. Where the majority of my adult life I felt like I was floundering. It was so refreshing.”

A User Experience (UX) designer, SCCA alumni Joe Brokken works at Getty Images with a team to solve problems and create user interfaces that streamline function and create beauty. “I’m helping great photographers sell their work. When I make that experience better, its got such a reach that it makes the whole internet better. Which is cool. Well, at least it makes all the Buzzfeed look better!” In Fall 2014 he worked to develop a Getty Images desktop app that lets you browse through the immense catalog of photography and enjoy images set as desktop wallpaper.

The two years I spent in the Graphic Design program at Seattle Central Creative Academy (SCCA) were some of the most intensely transformative of my life. In this program, you learn by doing. Working independently and in small groups on a staggering array of projects, your fellow students contribute to your learning through both organic and formal critique sessions.

When I came to the Creative Academy I was a 28 year-old barista. Not sure what I would find at the Creative Academy and not confident I would be able to make it. Frankly, I was relieved just to have passed the competitive portfolio review. In our first class, we heard, ‘you’re here because in your work, we saw what might be the spark of a decent designer.’ And while it was sort-of disheartening to know that all we had to go on was maybe a spark, we were also resetting–in a lot of ways.

SCCA was the best career decision I’ve made so far. The combination of an ever-evolving curriculum and professors currently working in their fields keeps the graduates on the cutting edge of the industry. The rigorous course work and many group projects were excellent training grounds to compose a good work ethic.