polished solid is a full-service design consultancy, providing custom solutions for interactive, print, and motion graphics. Currently, headquartered in Philadelphia’s center city district, polished solid was founded in 1997. For more than a decade, the award-winning consultancy has produced a variety of high-impact and quality design solutions. We combine research, knowledge, and a solid process to create and deliver quality, custom designs suited to a variety of budgets and industries. We help our clients through a research, design, and development process in order to fine tune and promote their brand(s) in the best ways possible.
De Angela L. Duff – principal / creative director
De Angela is also a designer, photographer, web developer, and DJ. She also serves as an interim director and associate professor within the Multimedia Department of the College of Media and Communication at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Prior to this, she was an art director for Nettmedia, a NYC Interactive Design Firm. She has spoken at AIGA’s Social Studies & Massaging Media 2 Conferences, and HOW’s Annual Design Conference. She has judged HOW’s interactive design competition, and has been featured in HOW, Print, Now Loading and www.animation: Animation Design for the World Wide Web. She has served on the City of Philadelphia’s Mayor Michael Nutter’s committee to re-brand Philadelphia, and participated in the Free Library of Philadelphia’s Website Brainstorming Charrette. On UArts Radio, she hosts a show, No Turn Unstoned, which is syndicated by Italian radio station, radiozerogravity.net. She is a member of AIGA, IxDA, PANMA & CAA. She holds a MFA from MiCA, a BFA from Georgia State University, and a BS from Georgia Tech.
As a child growing up in Eutaw, Alabama, drawing wasn’t something De Angela decided to do on occasion. Drawing was something she did every single day, just like breathing, eating, and sleeping. By the time she was a teenager, her love of drawing had to also make way for the power of typography, photography, and music. By 1996 while working for Georgia Tech’s College of Computing, she started fiddling around with the WWW by reverse engineering HTML on Mosaic, the first public web browser. By 1997, she moved to NYC to fulfill her dreams of becoming a world-class designer. By 1998, she wanted to inspire and help shape others, as others had for her, so she started sharing her love of design and technology with students at The University of the Arts. Presently, she lives, works, and plays in and around the Philadelphia & New York areas.