About Me

Personal Experience

Hi, my name is Marie Castine and I am a Designer in Atlanta, GA. I am one of the few non-transplants in Atlanta as I was born and raised in a suburb outside the large city. From a young child, I have always been attracted to designing and creating art. While most kids went to summer camps at a lake, I went to art and computer camps which I thoroughly enjoyed! In high school, I was involved in clubs such as the Art Club and Photography Club. My hobbies include designing greeting cards for friends and family, playing games on the computer, traveling and just being with my wonderful husband, Riley and our sweet dog, Annie.

Professional Experience

Life as always has a way of getting in the way so I did not get professionally involved in designing until I landed a job with a large advertising company in Atlanta called Clarion Marketing / DMBB. While I did not have any professional experience, my boss knew I had the passion and she allowed me to work with her on many designs for large companies such as Krystals, IMB, and TNT just to name a few.

 

During this time, I went to school for 3D animation because I thought I would love that but I soon realized that I enjoyed web designing much more. So instead of going back for more schooling, I taught myself the basics in web design and soon landed a job with a small studio in Marietta.

 

I continued to progress in design and coding at the studio but soon I was wanting to do more than the studio wanted to handle. So I took a design job with BellSouth, designing websites for customers. My skills started to increase a lot faster and I was soon teaching other designers on how to create their websites faster and with better quality. Since I did not have a degree in Web Design, I decided to go back to school part-time while still working.

 

I was soon promoted to Senior Designer, Team Lead then a year later promoted to Design Manager. Soon, upper management noticed my focus on quality and asked me to head up a new Quality Assurance department.

 

While I learned a lot about management and myself, I realized that I enjoyed designing and not managing other people. I found a job with the CDC maintaining the H1N1 website and keeping busy with work and schooling. Knowing that the contract with CDC was temporary since H1N1 was a one-time incident, I was offered another position with the Office for State, Tribal, Local and Territorial Support. I am currently redesigning, maintaining and updating the websites for the different agencies to utilize.

 

I moved to OADC where I began to learn more about SharePoint and InfoPath forms. I found that I really enjoy creating these forms and setting up dashboards for upper leadership. These forms have helped the customers become better at submitting tasks, designers at completing the tasks correctly and management getting better reports.