About
My name is Erik Burns, and this site presents my work as a freelance interaction designer and user interface specialist. I also like to build start-ups in my free time (e.g., xBrowse and GigiTraders), and this site doubles as a showcase for that work.
I am currently residing in Santa Cruz, Ca, and loving every minute of it. I am available for onsite consulting in the entire San Francisco Bay Area, and additionally available for remote consulting in other locations throughout the US. I love working on digital projects, and connecting with other motivated people in this amazingly fast-paced and ever-changing digital industry we call the web.
History
I received my undergraduate training in neuroscience from Stanford University. While at Stanford, I had the good fortune to conduct original research for which I received the Beckman Scholarship — a single award given to the top undergraduate student in any scientific field. This amazing experience taught me that I wanted to spend more time with people and less time in a lab, so I transitioned my skills to the business world, and never looked back.
I’ve been working in various digital capacities for more or less my entire professional career. I started out as a webmaster, and after falling in love with some of the amazing web designs of the late 90’s, gradually transitioned my skill-set to that of a designer. Interaction design (and more generally, architecture) can be seen as the ultimate fusion of science, art, and humanity, so it’s perhaps not too surprising that I am standing where I am today — both grateful and proud to call myself a designer.
Connections
You may get in touch with me through any of my various digital profiles.
LinkedIn. I use this site for business networking. I try to keep my network tight and high quality, so please only request to link to me if we have actually worked together.
Twitter. I use Twitter primarily to store and share relevant links and best practices for user experience and user interface engineering. If that sounds useful to you, please feel free to follow me.
Facebook. While Facebook has received a lot of bad press recently, they are deserving pioneers in user interface, front-end engineering, and web applications as a service. I am proud to call myself an (occasional) user of their service. Feel free to stop by my page, and say hey.