Gelatobaby!

For a writer, Portfolio Center alum Alissa Walker keeps showing up in the oddest places. From the design blog UnBeige to HGTV, Alissa is making a career of being in the right place at the right time. But that didn’t happen without a lot of hard work, soul searching, and risk taking.

Less than two years ago, Alissa lived with five roomies and worked at a high-stress—although very cool--job at a production house. The position afforded her an enviable lifestyle, but the work took her off her chosen path. She was, as they say, stuck in a rut.

Alissa had a hunch that a different perspective could get her back on track, so she planned a trip to Europe. She’d never traveled alone or even lived by herself, and she wanted to prove she could do it. She also thought she’d use the break to write some of the stories that had been sitting in her head.

After two months alone in France and Italy, it occurred to Alissa that if she could do this (dining by herself, speaking another language, finding places to stay every night, writing), everything else would be easy! Suddenly she had the confidence she needed to move out of the big house, leave the cush job, and really focus on her dream to be a freelance writer. That's when, she says, Gelatobaby was born.

She found enough copywriting jobs to keep her busy but began looking for other creative outlets. Since venturing on her own, she has written for STEP, HOW, Dynamic Graphics, the LA Times, ReadyMade, Wired, Metropolis, Design Observer, and Dwell. She joined the board of AIGA/LA, which led to contract work for AIGA National, where her current job title is “Storyteller.”

For the past year, Alissa has been the production assistant for the public radio show “DnA: Design and Architecture,” hosted by Frances Anderton in LA, and she is the new editor of UnBeige, recently named by Newsweek as “one of six design sites that define cool.” As if that weren’t enough, in her spare time, she’s teaching two writing classes for mediabistro.com: Design Writing for Designers and Breaking Into Design Journalism.

But here’s the icing on the cake: After her little Hollywood house appeared on the HGTV show “Small Space, Big Style,” the producers were so impressed by her ingenuity and enthusiasm that they invited her to be the “design expert” for the show, commenting on other people’s small spaces. She just finished taping her first round of episodes.

Alissa Walker: another example of innovative thinking, brave entrepreneurship, and good, old-fashioned initiative.