About

Design Director / Map Maker

Contact: amproehl (at) gmail . com

I’ve been building and leading design teams for over twenty-five years. This includes designing consumer products at Fortune 500 companies (Sony, Yahoo, Motorola) and, most recently, SaaS products at enterprise software companies. I currently lead a design team at Meltwater, a SaaS company that helps organizations gain market intelligence by understanding trends in news and social media. My team is responsible for product design, user experience research, data visualization, product content and a design system based on Google’s Material Design. Together, we’ve designed a series of products including our core platform, native mobile apps and an artificial intelligence / machine learning insight platform.

The common thread in all of my work is a belief that design helps people see. This can take the form of a quick sketch or diagram on a whiteboard, a map of a place or an interactive design prototype. Design helps companies see where they’re going.

I studied architecture and design in college which was a great foundation for design thinking. I started professional life as an exhibit designer in New York City working for the early pioneer of interactive experience design, Edwin Schlossberg. This work led me to the field of product design and a move to California. I joined Sony to help them transition from stand-alone devices to networked services and was awarded over twenty U.S. patents for networked media products.

My side hustle is making maps. They are a fascinating media type that mixes visual and typographic elements. Maps dance between images that we view and text that we read. They are interesting design problems and the experience of creating them has informed my other work.

My other activities have included serving on the Board of Directors at the Children’s Creativity Museum in San Francisco, serving as a juror for the Smithsonian Institute’s National Design Awards and being a volunteer camp counselor at Camp Okizu, a camp for children and families dealing with cancer. When I’m not working, I enjoy kayaking, travel, hiking and camping. Most of all, I love being with my wife, Anne.