Nikki Kipple

Hey! I'm Nikki. I've been teaching design and interaction design for well over a decade — full-time at a community college here in the Bay Area, and part-time at a private art school. In between, I build small products and spend a little too much time tinkering in the browser until 2am when I should be sleeping.

My design journey started on a high school yearbook committee — zero-period class, so you know I liked it. I went to college obsessed with branding and packaging design. Halfway through, the first iPhone shipped and I pivoted hard into UI/UX and product design. Best decision I ever made.

After a few years in agency roles — UX, product, marketing — an unexpected teaching opportunity at my alma mater changed everything. Since then I've been building products, writing curriculum, mentoring students, and watching them land at places like Figma, Amazon, Lyft, Meta, Pinterest, and Cisco.

These days, between classes, I'm mostly building products as a design engineer. The veil between design and code keeps getting thinner and thinner — design is shifting, the handoff is blurring, and I like being part of the whole process. Most of what I build lives in React and Tailwind, and most of it starts in the browser.

When I'm not tinkering or grading, I'm probably wandering San Francisco with my family — farmers markets, beaches, parks, and as many Giants games as the season allows. I love this city in an unreasonable way.

I also believe design and creative thinking are some of the best tools we have for making things clearer, kinder, and more useful. That's what I'm after, whether I'm teaching it or building it.