WEST LIBERTY, W.Va., Jan. 19, 2022 — West Liberty University design student Lauren Anderson brought home the gold with her recent honor in a national student design competition sponsored by the Innovation Center for Design Excellence (ICDE).
“Our students have been winning numerous arts and design contests but winning the UX UI category with a gold medal for the first time is very meaningful,” said Moonjung Kang, WLU professor of Visual Communication Design.
Both the silver and bronze winning students came from American University in Washington D.C., which has a much longer history of establishing UX UI design courses in its program, according to Kang.
“I cannot be prouder of our talented student Lauren and am pleased that our design program has been noticed and received attention from other design professionals and educators.”
Kang explained that she hopes more people will learn how UX UI works in our daily lives and why this knowledge could be very promising for students seeking promising careers.
UX stands for user experience and UI stands for user interface, both essential to good web design and software success.
The WLU design program in UI UX started in the fall of 2019, added Kang.
“We achieved this positive result in a very short time. We built an independent study course, Interaction Design, to offer Anderson a more intensive learning experience.
Lauren was one of the most talented students and eager to learn everything. So, I gladly created an independent study to help her feed her passion for UI UX Design,” Kang said.
Anderson graduated this past December and is now employed at Madden Media, an Arizona firm that specializes in destination marketing. She is from New Martinsville, W.Va. and was a Dean’s List student while at WLU.
“She got so many jobs offered even before graduation and Lauren plans to continue her UI UX design study at a graduate program school and has already been accepted at several significant schools.”
For her senior project this past semester, Anderson created an application called “Planterra” that helps people maintain and grow their plants to their fullest potential, allowing people to reach out and expand their knowledge along with the help of others.
- To view Anderson’s senior capstone project that won her gold, please click here.
- To view a WLU UI UX Design promotional video featuring Anderson, please click here.
The Visual Communication program is one of the many majors offered in the College of Liberal and Creative Arts. To contact Kang and learn more about enrolling, please email her at mkang@westliberty.edu.
To view all three medal winning student projects, please click here.