About Liz Cademy

When I was a kid, I would spend long lazy afternoons looking over a Chartpak catalog. [Chartpak sold press-on letters and graphic elements for layout on art boards, pre-computer.] I would clip interesting advertising art from my father’s engineering magazines. I studied the type in books, tracing rivers down the page. [A river is when the space between words lines up, forming a path down the page.]

Since then, my life led in interesting directions, but design has never been far from my heart. I studied Anthropology in college, ended up in corporate finance (with an MBA) and became the mom to two intense, high energy kids. All that time, I was designing things in my work and as a hobby:

• graphic interpretations of complex financial data (thank you, Edward Tufte);
• knitting patterns, both the knitted design and the layout of the printed pattern;
• birthday party invitations, preschooler sticker charts and household charts;
• flyers and handouts for assorted kid and adult activities;
• registration materials for conferences;
• etc.

I taught myself HTML and CSS and played with building web pages. As a gift for someone close to me, I designed a “Mad Engineer” logo. I found a print on demand company to print it on a tee shirt. When a total stranger bought the shirt, I started designing more and Cartesian Bear Industries was born. Setting up my online shop improved my web design and coding skills.

I created design projects for various volunteer organizations, including Odyssey of the Mind, Banbury Cross Morris Dance and the 2012 Hastings Elementary School 5th grade yearbook.

When my kids no longer needed a full-time mommy, I turned to my love of design and web coding as a career. I set up Polymath Solution as my design business to do freelance work in web, digital and print design. I love working with clients, helping them solve their website problems, and teaching them good design, the importance of creating a solid user interface, and how to use their web sites.

When the opportunity came to work full time as a web coder for Merrill Lynch, I took it, and put my freelance career on hiatus. I am still interested in freelance work, though my time is more limited these days.

My kids are fully grown now, and I followed my dream of moving to Minneapolis. I’m in the process of restoring a 1900 era duplex in the Uptown district.

For more information:

Resume: I update my resume every few months. Use the Contact tab to ask for the latest version.

Visit my LinkedIn profile