Every so often, we’ll chat with an alum about what they do and how they got there. Today, we’re talking with executive director of Young Playwrights’ Theater, Brigitte Pribnow Moore ’05, theatre, about what it’s like to combine multiple interests and skills into one awesome career. 

Name: Brigitte Pribnow Moore
Job Title: Executive Director
Employer: Young Playwrights’ Theater
Scholarships Received at UMBC: UMBC University Fellow 2001-2005

Q:  Tell us a little about how you wound up at UMBC. What’s your background?

I came to UMBC from a small town in Connecticut. I knew I wanted to study theatre, and I heard that UMBC’s BFA in Acting program was a “hidden gem.” I came out for an audition and I fell in love. The year I started at UMBC, the theatre department was a small program with a brilliant faculty providing rigorous artistic training, and producing innovative, high-quality performances with fairly limited resources. It has been such a joy watching UMBC’s theatre program grow in resources and recognition over the past decade, and the new Performing Arts and Humanities Building is a beautiful addition to the campus. I am so excited to see what future theatre students create and share in that space.

Q:  You’ve been able to combine multiple loves/skills into a career. How did you figure out that you wanted to do all those things, and do you have any advice for other folks who find themselves with multiple, diverse career interests?

I left UMBC with an incredible artistic education, but I also had the opportunity to explore a wealth of liberal arts courses outside my department. I spent my time at UMBC completing my theatre degree, but I also took classes that ranged from political science, to film history, to statistics, to non-western civilizations. I participated in volunteer and part-time work outside UMBC that complemented my interests, serving on political campaigns and writing and editing a weekly newsletter for a statewide advocacy organization. When I graduated, I did not have a solid career plan, but I had a rich and varied academic foundation, a network of community contacts in Baltimore and DC, and a strong sense of the impact I wanted to have on the world. I didn’t leave UMBC with a career goal. I left with a mission. And that mission carried me through almost a decade of diverse jobs that included working on union organizing campaigns, serving as the legislative director for two Maryland state delegates, and, ultimately, running Young Playwrights’ Theater.

My advice for other folks with a variety of interests: don’t put yourself in a box. Dive deep and excel in your major, but dare to take classes outside your discipline, and to engage boldly with the rich and diverse off-campus community that surrounds UMBC. Also, wait on grad school until you have worked for a few years and know exactly what, if anything, you need to learn to succeed in your career. If you’re like me, you may not be where you expected, and your evolving interests and needs may surprise you.

Q:  Tell us about your career. Were there any lessons you learned, in particular, at UMBC that you carried with you into your work?

I currently serve as the Executive Director of Young Playwrights’ Theater, a DC-based nonprofit that uses the arts to inspire young people to realize the power of their own voices and stories. I feel incredibly lucky to have found myself in a career that allows me to make a living doing something I love, and my time at UMBC was instrumental in helping me to discover and pursue and my dreams. The study of theatre is, at its heart, the study of what it means to be human – to relate and connect with others and to ponder and pursue one’s place in the world. My classes taught me a great deal about the art of theatre, but they also taught me the art of empathy, critical and analytical thinking, and persuasive communication. I left UMBC with an intellectual and interpersonal toolkit that helped me in every professional task I took on – from writing an impactful speech for a political candidate, to inspiring a donor to support a cause, to effectively leveraging the talents of a professional team.

Q:  Is there a particular class or professor who really inspired you?

All of them? Seriously, the UMBC theatre department employs such brilliant, talented, and caring instructors. I felt privileged to know and learn from each of them. I did have a particularly inspiring experience in a directing class I took with Christopher Owens. I learned so much about the power of good stories, and I discovered that I was happiest and most comfortable in artistic and professional roles that allowed me to direct people and resources toward a big picture vision. That class was transformational for me.

Q:  What advice would you give to students considering UMBC?

Pull your application materials together and send them along. UMBC is special place with a wealth of opportunities to learn and explore with gifted, caring professors and a diverse, talented community of students. You won’t regret your decision.

This poll asked people if they like their code editor colors "dark code on light background" or "light code on dark background." Turns out about 2/3 of people prefer light code on dark background.

For the first several days after the Poll ran, light-on-dark was winning by a landslide with 90 or more percent. But over the last month, it has settled into 63% of people preferring it and 37% preferring dark-on-light.

Personally I'm surprised it went as low as 63%. In all the places I've worked and places I've visited and such, rarely do I see a coder working in dark-on-light in their actual code editor. In blog posts and the like, dark-on-light is more common for whatever reason. Probably to be more consistent with the writing in which dark-on-light is nearly ubiquitously preferred.

Now that we have some numbers on preference, it's interesting to think about why it is that way. Especially in contrast to writing. Is it because there just happens to be more quality light-on-dark themes available? Is it easier on the eyes for longer periods? Is dark-on-light actually easier to read but harder on the eyes? Is there something about the brain and the type of thinking that coding requires that prefers more dark? Is it the environments around the computer screen that encourage more dark? Jeremy wonders if corrected vision plays a role. Does age play a role? Are there more connections to be found between how people prefer it and other factors?

Normally I let polls run a little longer but I have another idea ready so look for a new poll in the next day or so.

Poll Results: Light-on-Dark is Preferred is a post from CSS-Tricks

Responsive design has enjoyed several years of popularity now and design patterns that link mobile, tablet, and desktop experiences are starting to emerge. In this post, I’ll suggest some specific techniques and point out some further reading.

What’s a design pattern?

On the web, a design pattern is a common method of solving a design problem. For instance, if you enter a query into any search engine, the results will probably be spread across many pages. What’s the best way to navigate across all of those pages? Well, every search engine approaches the problem with the same solution. Down at the bottom, each search result page will include a next link (to move forward by 1 page) and numbers (to jump to individual pages). This concept as a whole is commonly referred to as pagination; and in turn, pagination is an example of a very common design pattern.

Examples of pagination from Google, Yahoo!, and Bing

Designers should take advantage of design patterns like this, because more often than not, the problem they’re dealing with has already been solved by someone else. No need to reinvent the wheel if it’s already been built, tested, and perfected.

Responsive Design Patterns

Let’s get to the goods.

These sets of problems and solutions are well documented for the old web (one where mobile devices don’t exist). There are lots of design patterns, they’re well understood, and they’re well established across many websites. This is not the case for the mobile landscape, where UX and UI is evolving at a more rapid pace. In fact, it’s moving so quickly, that it’s even influencing desktop interfaces, which is another good reason to design your mobile interfaces first. There’s still a lot of room for innovation, but here are a few common situations you might encounter when designing your next responsive site.

Responsive Galleries

Let’s start out simple with a pattern you probably encounter a lot: image galleries. Brad Frost has put together a wonderful collection of responsive design patterns that I’ve included in the resources section. Check out his example of a gallery (or image grid, as he calls it). When the example is loaded, try resizing the browser. You’ll notice that the grid collapses itself so that there are fewer and fewer columns as the page gets smaller.

I would add to this example that you should consider the margin, padding, and borders on each of your images as you move across screen sizes. For example, at full width on my computer, those images feel a little bit tight and could probably use some negative space. Below is an image depicting this adjustment:

Responsive Progress Bars

The term progress bar is a bit muddled, but in this case, I’m referring to progress bars that walk you through a series of steps. This could be anything from checking out at an online store to filling out a user profile. In essence, you use a progress bar in situations where there are steps involved; presenting everything on one page could potentially overwhelm the user. Breaking it up across multiple pages helps to ease this burden, and it also helps indicate how far along they are in the process. Below is an example of a progress bar (scaled up for the purposes of this example).

This is a little bit tricky, because it’s typically very wide and narrow. When sized down to a mobile screen, this wouldn’t look very good as is. This is where responsive patterns get a little bit more advanced: You have to think about the essence of what’s being communicated and then decide if anything can be slashed. From there, you rebuild a new widget. In my opinion, the progress bar really only needs to communicate the name of the current step and then give some idea of where that step is in the process. Here’s a solution I came up with:

The dark areas indicate where you might display the name of the current step. The lighter areas would be clickable and allow you to jump to other steps. I think this is a bit ideal, because there may be a process that’s too lengthy and would fill the screen with these bars. In those instances, the two arrows might suffice, like this:

They don’t tell you exactly how many steps there are, but they at least give an indication that there’s a step behind you and a step ahead of you.

Responsive Tables

Tables are notoriously difficult to make responsive. The problem is that tables tend to be very wide with many columns, but mobile devices (particularly in portrait view) tend to be quite narrow. Fortunately, numerous solutions have surfaced in recent years. Chris Coyier put together an excellent responsive table blog post that outlines a few of these. I have two favorite solutions.

Maybe this first one is a bit too clever, but I like the idea of replacing a table with a visual. In other words, mobile devices and small screens might display a graph that conveys the information, but a larger screen would expand the graph to show the full data table. Under the hood, you could still keep the data for accessibility and SEO purposes.

While interesting, that solution probably isn’t ideal for most scenarios. If you absolutely need to display the data in a table without compromise, then Zurb’s Responsive Table solution is the best I’ve seen.

Resources

This just scratches the surface of responsive patterns. You should definitely check out the responsive web design pattern collection from Brad Frost for comprehensive code examples of many common interfaces. It’s also worth taking a look at both Pattern Tap and the Yahoo! Design Pattern library. They don’t have responsive patterns exclusively, but they’ll give you a good idea of the types of patterns that are already popular.

• Responsive Web Design Patterns via Brad Frost
• Pattern Tap – A collection of design patterns.
• Yahoo! Design Pattern Library

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