By Jara Rowe, Content Marketing Specialist
Get to know our Product Designer, Chris Dressler.
Building a great company from the ground up isn’t easy, but it is something that Trava takes pride in. We are lucky to have a great and hardworking team. As most of our team is behind the scenes, and not customer-facing, we wanted to take the opportunity to introduce ourselves through Trava Employee Spotlights.
Meet Chris Dressler, Trava’s Product Designer.
My role is a user experience and user interface designer. Those are the folks who take the desires of the users and the company and design, and translate those things into the actual interface of the product. So the graphical interface, as people would say.
Holy smokes! Three words? That's hard. Human, exciting... Oh, man. I'm torn on the third one. Laughter. Can I add a fourth side word? Fulfilling.
From a spiritual, meditative perspective, I tend to really refill when I'm in the woods. From an internal joy perspective, when I'm creating, I tend to be most fulfilled. It's not always necessarily user experience design or user interface design, but being creative in general. And I would say when I am traveling, is probably when I am at my most happy.
Yeah. So I mean, I guess I would say it's going to be okay. You're going to get through this, and I'd probably... You know what one of the things I'd probably say? So I used to be a comic artist, and I had worked at that, I just did it. And I think I would've said to myself at that time,
"Forget everything else. Go work for Marvel Comics."
"Success is nothing more than going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm."
We did the insurance broker platform, or the insurance broker piece of the product. And that was enjoyable because it was doing something a little bit different. Everything prior to that was really more like paint by numbers. I was mapping to everything that had been done before and it was definitely a departure from what had been done before, but it was also interesting because whether you know it or not, you're used to seeing certain kinds of elements out there in certain ways, even if there's a wide variety. There's all kinds of different stuff, but this was a little bit different. This was a little bit ambitious, in terms of what it was trying to do and what it was trying to be. And that's exciting, that's enjoyable.
I'm an animal person. People used to call me nature boy, because I was always out catching something, picking something up, getting bitten by something.
I think there was a time where I was a cat person, but I think that has since shifted. I remember, it was interesting, when I really was yearning to be a father, dogs would come to me just all the time, and kids would come to me all the time. It was really strange. And after that, I'm not going to say I became a dog person, but I would say that my love of dogs expanded.
So I don't know, we have this gigantic fat cat and I love him, and I just really love, love, love dogs. I've wanted a dog for a very long time. I wanted a dog to travel with me.
$20 million and 40 kids. No. What's my definition of success? I will know. I mean, it's coming from places in my life that were... to say they were modest, I was of modest means is a vast understatement. Especially being at the level I am or at the age I am and having not long ago completely had a career change into design, I think a lot about generating wealth for the latter part of my life. And I think a lot about generating wealth that stays with my children, but I think that if I'm one, able to travel at will wherever, and my financial wealth and security is such that I can provide that for myself after retirement, which is probably about 95 at this point, and do the same for my kids, I think that's success on one hand.
I think the other thing is that if I have been able to gain a somewhat senior role at Google, there's no question that I will say I have been successful at my job, at my career. That is a measure of success. And probably until that time, it'll probably be imposter syndrome every other day.
