Brandi Sea Heft-Kniffin-

Brandi Sea Heft-Kniffin is an award-winning designer, educator, and creative leader living in and around Albuquerque, New Mexico. She has been awarded for her poster design work including Judge’s Choice at the 2016 Adobe Creative Jam. In 2017, she was also awarded a prestigious “Albuquerque 30″ award from the American Advertising Federation, which celebrates the 30 greatest ideas of the year. Brandi has been working as a professor at her alma mater, Southwest University of Visual Arts since 2015 teaching advanced Design Concepts. She began her design career in 2001 as a student and graduated valedictorian with her Bachelor’s in Graphic Design. Brandi is actively involved with her local design community and is currently serving as Education Director for AIGA’s New Mexico Chapter.

With over 15 years of experience as a Designer, Art, and Creative Director, Brandi founded BrandiSea Design in an effort to promote better design thinking. She started the Design Matters blog in 2015, produces design tips on YouTube called Design Tip Tuesday and in February 2017 she began Design Speaks, a weekly podcast. The Design Speaks podcast is an effort to share with designers and explain to non-designers the impact and importance of design in our everyday lives.

Brandi knows that design is about communication and that words matter in the process of finding your way to a concept. She believes that the key to success as a graphic designer and visual communicator is having a design process and knowing the value of great color and type choices in your designs. She is known for always asking “why” when presented with a design for critique because she knows that good design choices always have good reasoning to back them up. In her free time, you will likely find her reading classic literature, practicing her lettering, listening to geeky podcasts, rock climbing, or playing board games with her husband and two kiddos.

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