People

Berkeley, California

Daniel Parolek, Founding Principal

Karen Parolek, Principal

Stefan Pellegrini, Principal

Karen Parolek, Principal

Karen Parolek strives to improve people’s lives by making web sites, software, signage, and documents simple to understand and use. As an information architect, she considers herself a translator, transforming confusing and overwhelming mounds of data into helpful and easily understood information. Realizing that her skills applied to an ever-increasing realm of both old-world and new-world media, Karen joined Opticos Design, Inc. in 2000 to explore applying usability design across these worlds. Since then, her work has run the gamut from designing a scheduling and marketing software program for audiologists’ offices to designing and implementing a web site for the Liz Claiborne Art Ortenberg Foundation, from designing of a meta data schema for VeriSign’s content management system (CMS) to being a founding member of the Form-Based Codes Institute, a non-profit organization focusing on providing an alternative regulatory system for towns and neighborhoods to enable more livable and pedestrian-friendly environments.

Most recently, her work has focused on leading the way towards establishing standards of code usability and communicating those standards to a growing FBC community of practice. Clarity, simplicity, and ease-of-use are core values of modern form-based codes. As a graphic designer with an extensive background in designing web sites, software, signage, and planning documents, Karen designs codes that are standard setting. With her husband, Dan Parolek, and the late Paul Crawford, Karen helped design and write the definitive book on FBCs, Form Based Codes: A Guide for Planners, Urban Designers, Municipalities, and Developers. She lectures frequently on form-based codes and their design.

Prior to joining Opticos, Karen was the Senior Information Designer at NBC Internet, a top-10 Internet portal web site, previously known as Snap.com. She has also been a Senior Designer at Pentagram, a high profile international design consultancy, where her projects included wayfinding signage systems for downtown New York City, Disney’s town of Celebration, Florida, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. At Pentagram, she worked on projects with various well-known architects, including Robert AM Stern; James Stewart Polshek; Cooper, Robertson & Partners; Richard Meier; Peter Eisenman; and Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates.