Hi! I'm Alida 🙂
About Me
I’m a graphic designer, artist, and overall creative person currently living in beautiful Bellingham, Washington. After earning a BA in Costume Design from Western Washington University in 2019, I moved to Scotland, completing a one-year Masters program at the University of Glasgow in Dress and Textile History. Then the pandemic happened, leading me to move back home to Seattle where I spent a few years in the world of retail (check out my chalkboards for Mud Bay!).
Eventually I decided to move back to Bellingham and learn Visual Communications from Whatcom Community College, where I found a real passion for the graphic arts and graduated with my Associate of Technical Arts in 2026.
I’m excited to see where life leads me next!
My Thoughts On AI
Everything seems to be getting the “AI” label these days and I think it’s important to remember that there are two main kinds of AI: traditional and generative.Â
Traditional AI (or as I like to call it: “The Computer”) has been around since the early days of computing. It is Google predicting the rest of your search, it is the spam filter on your email, it is the CPU you play against in online chess. Traditional AI is great! (That awesome cancer-detecting AI? Traditional AI!)
Generative AI is what I have issues with. This is the ChatGPT, the Gemini, the Midjourney – anything that makes something from nothing. Because it doesn’t make something from nothing. Everything that a GenAI can produce has been scraped from human creators across the globe and across history. Not to mention the environmental impacts, hallucinations, and cases of people becoming dangerously dependent on GenAI.
But I would be a liar if I said I never use GenAI. I’ll employ the generative expand and remove tools in Photoshop when needed, and I have consulted ChatGPT once or twice to break out of a creative block. But I will never have full conversations with an AI and I will never use it as more than a small tool in my creative process. If it could be done before age of AI, it can be done now without the use of AI.