ABOUT NEON PALM STUDIO

 

Neon Palm Studio is a collaboration between designer and developer Niki Selken and SEO specialist and content writer Sarah Vickers-Webb. Niki and Sarah met in their early 20s, bonding over campy films, karaoke, and fashion. As they began collaborating on website design, copy and SEO projects, they realized their complimentary skills matched up perfectly and founded Neon Palm Studio. 

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Sarah Vickers-Webb

Co-Founder

Sarah Vickers-Webb (they/them) is a search engine optimization (SEO) specialist, content writer and digital marketing strategist based in Santa Cruz, California, with a background in law, gender studies, and cultural criticism. 

Sarah uses their SEO expertise, copywriting skills, and eye for trends to create online and social media content and campaigns that create brand awareness, drive traffic to clients’ websites and improve search engine rankings. They are also the content manager and lead writer for Emoji Foundation. Past clients include Santa Cruz Tech Beat, FACE Oakland, 1440 Multiversity, Spiral Up, Wildflower Financial, and MadJacks Snowsports. They also have experience managing social media accounts, including Wild Heart Bakeshop.


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Niki Selken

Co-Founder

Niki Selken 👩🏻‍💻(she/her) is an artist, technologist and educator. Niki spent over a decade working across game design, physical computing, experimental theatre, interaction design and education. As a designer and technologist, Niki focused on working with nonprofits and small businesses in the inclusion and social impact space (Ms. Foundation, Girls Write Now, LYRIC, Hesperian Health Guides) and as an educator, she taught a range of creative coding courses in both New York and San Francisco. A graduate of Parsons School of Design, Niki has taught at her alma mater, at St. Joseph's College in Brooklyn, at the University of San Francisco, at the Bay Area Video Collective and at Gray Area—where she is the Creative Development Director and manages the artist incubator and creative code education programs. Niki's work has been featured by Yahoo Tech, Buzzfeed, Make Magazine and Adafruit, among others. Niki identifies as Latina and hails from a long line of Mexican artists and craftsmen.

Niki is considered one of the foremost Emoji experts in the world and has earned global recognition for her emoji work as well as her gaming and wearables projects. She founded the Emoji Foundation, created the Emoji Dictionary, and VR game EmojiFlower VR. Niki is the co-founder of the Emoji Foundation, an organization that promotes, explores, and translates the written word into the pictorial alphabet of Emoji. Her Emoji Dictionary project debuted at The Proof is in the Processor art show in New York City and was featured at Currents New Media Art Festival in Santa Fe. She followed up that work with a VR Emoji game, EmojiFlower VR, that is available for download in the iTunes store. Her game, Find Maria Rivera, exhibited at Indiecade and was selected as an Indiecade Award Finalist. And her Augmented Reality platform, Wayscape, earned her recognition as a Kill Screen game design scholar and a Parsons E-Lab fellow. Niki is a global finalist and a NASA Space Apps  winner for her wearable tech project, Senti8. She has performed and/or worked with Shakespeare Santa Cruz, Edinburgh Festival Fringe, The San Jose Stage Company, Yerba Buena Center for Performing Arts, Counterpulse Theater, and United Broadcasting Theater Company among others. In 2007 Niki founded the theater company, Ko Labs, which presented The Endless Frontier at the 2008 San Francisco Fringe Festival and at the 2009 Women on the Way Festival. She lives in San Francisco with her partner, lots of VR equipment, and a dragon/kitty named Falkor.