Lead Designer. Creative Director. Thirty years in the making.
Meet Nicole
I have been in design since 1995. I have worked in television news, entertainment PR, advertising, motion graphics, and academia. I have designed for screens, print, billboards, swag, newscasts, and more types of advertisers than I can count, and for most of my TV career, I managed a production department: directors, editors, camera operators, and a whole crew of technical people crammed into a small dark room, all working for me. If they knew how to use it, I made sure I did too.
Design has always been the through line. Everything else was the education.
The person behind the work
I taught myself new tools when I needed them and got excited about each one, the way my father, a physicist turned programmer, got excited about every new piece of technology he ever touched. I think I got that from him. I hope I never lose it.
Every project I take on runs through me, start to finish. Not because I don't trust anyone else. I just haven't figured out how to stop thinking about something once I've started caring about it, which my former crew will confirm is not always a fun quality to be around at 11pm. Thirty years of clients, producers, agencies, and sales staff will tell you I'm a people pleaser. I want you to be happy. But I'll tell you what I actually think, even when it's not what you want to hear, because I'd rather have an honest conversation with you than a comfortable one.
Outside the studio, I'm a foster parent to two incredible kiddos, one tiny dog named Cheese, and a very distinguished 17 year old cat. Good books, good design, and small details that make things feel considered, that's most of what I'm made of. Somehow it's also excellent training for this job.
the designer
design boutique
now
Nicole moved fully into web design, with other design projects becoming fewer and farther between. Not gone, she hasn't given up the other design work she loves, but the websites had become the thing. The challenge that kept growing. The medium that kept surprising her.
Thirty years after drawing lines over scanned road maps in Photoshop 3, she was exactly where she was supposed to be.
All In
2025
Nicole launched her first design business, intending to focus on print. She had been making wedding invitations for friends for years, and the work was beautiful. At one wedding, a guest, a former MLB pitcher turned financial mind, looked at her work and told her to go home and start a design business. So she did.
Print was lovely. It was also, very quickly, not enough of a challenge.
She took on more kinds of work. More kinds of problems. And then came the moment she'd been quietly avoiding: the first website. She didn't know how to write code. She didn't really know what HTML was, let alone CSS. Those things scared her, until she invested the time and started having fun.
She called her best friend out of breath the first time she wrote code that made text type across a screen. A version of that very first code still lives on the Kismet site today. She's sentimental like that.
The business had a name waiting for it too; one she'd been holding onto since before she knew what it was for. Kismet. It had started as a name for a wedding business that never quite launched. But the name was always bigger than weddings. Kismet isn't just about love or romance. It's about finding genuine connection, the feeling when the right things find each other at exactly the right time. When she realized the name could belong to something that meant more, the business became what it was always supposed to be.
The name that was always waiting.
2023
Outside of her academic work, Nicole started building websites for friends and family. Her mom's before and after school program needed something. No budget, and a fear of all things tech, even Facebook. That site led to another. That one led to a few more. Something was beginning.
Websites, quietly.
2020
Nicole left television for academia, returning to her alma mater at the University of Iowa. She built graphics packages, virtual sets, and animation templates for student newscasts, and taught motion graphics, videography, and screen design to anyone who paused in front of her long enough to listen. She was enthusiastic about it. She loved sharing old school ways to solve modern problems. The students learned a lot. So did she.
Back to the beginning and forward
2019
Nicole became obsessed with motion graphics and taught herself the tools to make it happen. Suddenly everything moved. It was, by her own description, a very focused year.
Everything starts moving.
2016
An expanded role in television moved Nicole into management, which meant designing not just for screens but for everything: web, print, billboards, swag, and campaigns for more types of advertisers than she could count.
Strategy entered the picture alongside craft. It never really left.
Design at scale
2008
More than a decade into a design career, Nicole built her first website... as a hobby. She didn't know it yet, but she had just met the medium she'd spend the next chapter of her
career falling in love with.
First website. Kind of by accident.
2007
A great television production and design opportunity brought Nicole back to the Midwest, and back to the kind of work that felt right.
Fast, visual, always on deadline.
Coming home
2001
Drawn by the pull of film, Nicole moved from the Midwest to Los Angeles. She quickly discovered that the pace of film production wasn't hers. She wanted to move faster, make more, control the rhythm of the work.
An entertainment PR firm gave her that. She absorbed their design work almost immediately. Sorry to the freelancer they used to hire.
Go West
1999
Nicole graduated from the University of Iowa with a BA in Mass Communications and a minor in Art.
The Hawkeyes got a designer. The design world got a communicator.
Degree in hand.
1997
Still in college, Nicole landed her first creative job as a production assistant for local television news. Before the year was out she was building graphics for newscasts, and realizing, for the first time, that design and storytelling could live in the same job.
Where it started.
1995
It was always going to end up here.
It just took thirty years to figure it out.
the winding road to kismet
becoming boutique
In a television station, the booth was my home. Directors, producers, audio mixers, the whole technical crew crammed into a small dark room, racing a clock that never stopped. Whether it was a graphics package built in four hours before a broadcast, or a homepage that needs to earn someone's trust in four seconds, the job has always been the same: find what's true about this one thing, and get out of its way.
Thirty years taught me the same lesson twice.
What drives the work
Once in a control room, once in a browser.
There's more on the philosophy behind how we work, for anyone who wants to go deeper.
That's still the whole job. The room changed. The instinct didn't.
Tell us what's working, what isn't, and what you wish your website did. We'll tell you exactly what that would take.
