hi, glad to have you here! 👋🏽
I'm Kavya, and I'm passionate about combining aesthetics, efficiency, and inclusivity to create perennial products. I recently started my first full time job as a product designer at Microsoft, where I work on the Azure Portal End to End Design team.
My interest in design started young, while helping my mother create kolams: traditional Tamil decorative art composed of straight lines, curves, and loops drawn around a grid pattern of dots. This keen sense of spacing and composition stayed with me as I grew older and ventured into other means of exploring my creativity.
Journalism also played a key role in my design journey. It was my first exposure to various design softwares, including Canva and Adobe Creative Suite. I wrote and designed for both my high school’s student-run newspaper, the Epic, as well as Stanford’s student-run publication, the Stanford Daily.
In my free time, you can find me dancing, spending time outdoors, or curled up in bed with a good book and a cup of peppermint tea :)
so why design?
If I had to pick a creature to represent myself, I’d pick a dinosaur. Before you react and keep scrolling, let me explain myself.
Dinosaurs are a cultural keystone in our history. They no longer exist, yet they constantly remind me of the importance of the past and the fragility of the present— even the mightiest power can be reduced to dust. However, despite their extinction, the permanent shadow they cast to this day serves as a reminder that the future is simply bricks laid on top of the past. As the designers of today, it’s imperative to remember that we are laying the foundation for the designers of tomorrow. The legacy we leave behind is completely up to us — a beautiful and scary thing.
We have the privilege of existing in a time of exciting change — with the introduction of generative AI, we are virtualizing effectively everything around us. This transition could either lead to further inclusion or further segregation, and I want to be a voice leading the fight for the former. As designers, we have the power to determine what our online world is going to look like, and we need to be mindful of those that are not able to advocate for themselves as we create that world.