What’s it really like to work at Chicago startups and tech companies? Blue Sky’s Inside Job lets people on the ground tell us in their own words.
Kinsey Gross, 26, Senior Designer at Truth Labs
I’m the resident lady designer. In this industry, you get a lot of that. This is the third time I’ve been the only girl on an all-male team. But these guys are great. They never make me feel like the odd man out, the odd woman out.
We’re a creative studio, and we focus on innovative digital solutions. Essentially, we’re a design and development shop, kind of like a very small agency. We are nine people. We do some brand storytelling, we do hardware and software, a lot of apps, tools. We’re starting to do a little experimentation with virtual and augmented reality work as well. We really like emerging tech.
We’ve worked with companies like Vamonde — a digital storytelling app — the Atlantic magazine and Wrigley Rooftops. For Wrigley Rooftops, we did a lot of custom photography and experimental 360-degree views of being in each seat so you can preview where you sit before you buy. We just recently launched the Park at Wrigley, and it has 3-D renderings of what is still coming at the park.
I started in September. All the designers here are hybrid user experience designers and visual designers. I’m new to user experience, so I feel real lucky to be here because I’m kind of learning on the job, and I have all these great people to learn from.
I’m actually related to (Alfred) Kinsey, the researcher. He’s a distant uncle of mine, and my family disowned him when his work became really huge because it was so frowned upon at the time. My friends got me a movie poster for “Kinsey: Let’s Talk About Sex,” and I have it up in my room. I love my name!
I grew up in the Seattle area, on a suburban island called Mercer Island. I was 2 when I started really drawing, and I drew these kind of humanoid things that were these blobs with big fat arms and legs and big smiley faces. I used to draw them over and over again and stare at them, and then have a huge tantrum because I knew they didn’t look like people. I’d rip them up and scream and pout. It was really frustrating, actually, for my parents. I was a perfectionist from the get-go.
I was at an envisioning studio called Tectonic in Seattle when I decided to move to Chicago, just to try something new. So I moved out here without a job and wound up at a creative advertising digital production house called Digital Kitchen. It was a great experience, but I was missing the interactive work that I had been doing in Seattle, and that’s when I found Truth Labs.
What really drew me here was the quality of the work. I felt like they were really ambitious and creatively energetic. The little room next door is kind of a lab. We have a 3-D printer in there, and all this gear and stuff we can program. They’re very hands-on and excited about making new stuff, and that’s the kind of place I wanted to be.
It’s corny, but we eat lunch together, and that’s really fun. We also go out together and get happy hour every other week. Most of us dressed up for Halloween. I was a Sandworm from “Beetlejuice.” For our Christmas party, we went out and did karaoke together in Chinatown. They were really sweet to do that because I kind of pushed them.
There’s quite a few of us who went through a phase where we were baking bread at home. I’m done with it because my bread sucked, and I’m pissed about it. No one likes failing that hard. All their bread was great, so they’re still doing it.
The culture is really nice in that we come here, and we do our work together, and we’re really friendly and joke around together. Then we have space to go home and live lives outside of work. It’s a really nice balance.
As told to freelance reporter Erin Chan Ding. Stories are edited for length and clarity.
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