This week, we spoke with Melanie Imfeld, a map design lead at Mapbox. Trained in architecture and urban design at ETH Zurich and UCL, Mel's journey has taken her through master-planning, digital product strategy, map design and team leadership. At every step, she's stayed grounded in curiosity and storytelling, and her reflections offer a compelling roadmap for navigating nonlinear creative careers.

Storytelling Across Domains

Mel began her career in architecture, but the seeds of her interdisciplinary approach were planted early. At ETH, she was exposed to a wide range of disciplines including math, economics, art history, which gave her a critical lens to spatial problems. She furthered sharpened this lens during her time at the Zurich city planning office, where she examined zoning, demographics, and transportation data to understand complex geospatial systems.

After pursuing a masters’ in spatial data science at University College London (UCL), she joined Accenture as a Digital Transformation Analyst. While helping translate technical Request for Proposals (RFPs) into visual narratives for clients at Accenture , she realized the fundamental similarity between urban design and her new role.

"In urban design, you pitch ideas through stories. At Accenture, I was helping experts do the same—just with technology."

Whether she was crafting a masterplan proposal or making complex data accessible to stakeholders, the core skill remained the same: transforming complexity into compelling, understandable narratives.

Learning by Doing with Purpose

A recurring theme in Mel's journey is how personal projects became the backbone of her professional growth, balancing pure curiosity with targeted skill development. Whether it was experimenting with map styles in D3.js or building an interface that exploded resumes into letter soups, each creative detour taught her something tangible, whether it was about animation, interactivity, or rendering performance, that eventually translated into more serious work.

"I'm a very applied learner. A project gives me an excuse to learn something new," she says. Rather than approaching learning as a checklist of skills to acquire, Mel emphasizes doing projects that feel personally compelling and letting the skills follow naturally. This intentional approach to learning carried her through creative coding, her time at Recurse Center, and now her work at Mapbox—each step building toward a clear purpose, even when the path wasn't obvious.

From Individual Contributor to Manager—Without Losing the Spark

Today, Mel leads a globally distributed team of map designers, but the transition from individual designer to manager hasn't dimmed her enthusiasm for the craft. If anything, it's deepened her appreciation for the design challenges at the heart of mapping.

"Designing navigation maps is fascinating. It's full of constraints, which actually makes it a more exciting design challenge."

Rather than seeing management as a departure from design, she views it as expanding her impact on the same problems that originally drew her to the field.

Her approach to management centers on a simple but powerful principle: helping others do their best work by truly understanding both the technology and the human behind it. This isn't about enforcing performance metrics or barking orders about KPIs. She explains:

"Unblocking people is a big part of my job. And that means really understanding what they're working on."

Having started out as a map designer herself gives her the technical fluency to dive deep into roadmap planning, review tricky visual details, and provide the kind of contextual support that empowers her team rather than micromanages them. It's management through empathy and expertise, not authority.

Turning Your Unconventional Background Into Your Superpower

Mel admits that early in her career, her unconventional resume felt like a liability. Without a clear through-line from architecture to urban planning to data visualization to product design, it was difficult to position herself for roles that demanded specialization. The turning point came when she began seeing her eclectic background as a strength. She reflects:

"Before I could convince others, I had to convince myself."

The act of crafting a narrative became crucial. Instead of apologizing for her non-traditional path, she learned to articulate how her diverse experiences created unique value. Her architecture training gave her spatial thinking skills. Her urban planning work taught her to navigate complex, interconnected systems. Her time at Accenture showed her how to translate technical complexity into accessible stories.

Communities like the Recurse Center reinforced this mindset, showing her that success doesn't always come from following a set path, but from building your own. The key was learning to tell her story with confidence, highlighting the connections between seemingly disparate experiences.

Combating Uncertainty: Balance Exploration with Joy

For early-career designers facing the inevitable uncertainty of a non-linear path, Mel offers both practical and philosophical advice. On the practical side: embrace the ambiguity. Try things. Move to a new city. Take that unconventional job. The traditional path isn't going anywhere, and the early part of your career is often the most flexible. She emphasizes:

"You can always get a conventional job later. This is the time to explore."

But perhaps more importantly, she recommends a strategy for combating the stress and doubt that comes with uncertainty: balance your job search with joy. Pursue small creative projects, hobbies, or experiments that reconnect you with your curiosity. These moments of personal exploration serve two purposes. They remind you why you chose a creative career in the first place, and they often lead to unexpected professional opportunities.

The message is clear: uncertainty isn't something to endure, it's something to leverage. Your unconventional background isn't a bug, it's a feature. And the story you tell about your journey matters as much as the journey itself.

Connect with Mel through LinkedIn, or if you’re in SF, you might find her at Farley’s Coffeehouse.

This article accompanies our podcast episode featuring Melanie Imfeld. You can listen to it here on Substack, or through Spotify and Apple Music.

References:

Carlo Ratti, director of Carlo Ratti Associates and the Senseable City Lab

UCL The Bartlett Center for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA), which Michael Batty founded and directed until 2010

The Recurse Center, a programming retreat in NYC

d3.js, a popular JavaScript library for data visualization

Blender explorations of landscape flythroughs by Wendy Shijia.

Helena Zhang’s phosphor icons.

Nat Slaughter, Mel’s former Mapbox colleague who now designs maps at Apple. He was featured on an episode of Very Expensive Maps, where he talks about collecting and mapping squirrel census data in NYC.

Daniel Schiffman, who creates fun and beginner-friendly creative coding tutorials on his Youtube channel The Coding Train.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thepragmaticdesigners.substack.com