About - Lara Kroeker Interactive

My mother was a travel host who planned niche tours around the world for senior citizen square dancers, and I’d leave school for weeks at a time to join the group. It gave me a strange, sideways way of looking at things that never really went away, which is probably why, twenty years later, I still can’t sit still inside one job title.

These days that shows up as design leadership, systems thinking, and hands-on technical execution, all under one name, because splitting those apart never made sense to me.

The platforms change. The fundamentals don’t.

I built my first sites in Flash, then Drupal, then a string of custom CMSes that don’t exist anymore. I watched the headless wave arrive and figured out what that actually meant for a project, not just for the pitch deck. Now it’s AI-native tools, and I’m doing the same thing again.

None of it mattered as much as I thought it would at the time. Every platform, no matter what was running underneath, needed the same things: clear Design Guidelines, information architecture that made sense, content that knew what job it was doing, a real answer to why the site existed in the first place. That’s still true. My job hasn’t fundamentally changed even with AI in the room, it’s still about those fundamentals. Learning whatever comes next has never been the hard part.

Flash Drupal Custom CMSes Squarespace WordPress The headless wave AI-native tools

How I got here

A well doesn’t work if the plumbing underneath is wrong.

Neither does an online experience.

For years I led an effort to bring water to a Tanzanian village too small to be on most maps. Over about three months we dug a hole 170 meters deep that, with solar power, now supplies water to seven points around the village. I lived there for the build and documented the process and the life around it. I saw hunger and joy in the same afternoon, determination and frustration in the same conversation, and I found a drive in myself I still can’t fully explain.

I came out the other side knowing myself better. I know when to say yes, and I know when to say hell no. That’s not a small thing, and it’s shaped every project I’ve taken on since.

It’s also where the patience for foundational work comes from.

Read the whole story →

How I work

Two tracks, depending on what fits the engagement.

I like working with people, not just for them. Over the years, the engagements I’ve enjoyed most were the ones where we were in it together in real time, not waiting on a proposal or a status update between us. Both of us wanted the same thing: less back-and-forth, more clarity, sooner. That’s basically why day-rate work exists as an option here.

It’s not the right fit for someone who wants to hand everything off and return to a finished product. Saying that early saves both sides a bad engagement.

Guest lectures, workshops, and mentoring on design systems happen alongside both tracks too, on request.

See how engagements work → More on guest teaching →

Day-rate work

For defined and repeatable scopes. Most engagements start here.

Design Guidelines
Online experience builds
Hosting migrations
Focused sessions of refinements

Solution engagements

For scoped, outcome-based work that doesn’t fit a day-rate. Priced by the problem being solved, not the days required.

Larger custom builds
Systems redesigns
Tailored digital products

Wildroot & Amber interactive installation

Outside of work

Where I get to be someone else for a while.

Interactive music installations

I perform and record as Mel·lif·lu·ous, building songs live from violin, voice, and looped electronics. The work has taken me to strange, quiet places: a fish-factory village in northern Iceland, a rice-farming town outside Fukuoka, Japan, both residencies where the only job was to make something. One of those projects grew into an interactive installation, glass jars releasing voices, wind, and water, that showed at Signals Creative Tech Expo, hosted by DigiBC in Vancouver.

Iceland was the one that changed something in me. I went there wanting to recreate myself and came home just wanting to be myself. Some nights that meant playing violin out loud to the wind and the mountains and the rocks, with no one listening but them. Japan gave me the words for it later, that we’re all just travelling between the versions of who we were and who we’re becoming, and music is where I get to live in that in-between. It’s a part of me that client work, however good, was never built to hold.

Emily Carr University of Art and Design

This photo is from the day I graduated from Emily Carr, Communication Design. I almost didn’t bother picking up the actual certificate. I remember asking, half joking, who’s even going to care? My dad was there, and he just said: I do. I went back to school while my daughter was still young, so it wasn’t the easy path, and that one answer is a big part of why I’ve cared, deeply, about finishing what I start ever since.

I’m curious about almost everything, with a soft spot for British Columbia and a bigger one for good food, good coffee, and the kind of people who don’t quite fit anywhere else. The weirdos, the eccentrics, the ones who are a little bit random. I’m one of them too.

Lara outside Emily Carr University of Art and Design on graduation day

Testimonials

What clients say.

A fantastic sense of humor, unbounded creativity, and a can-do entrepreneurial spirit. She’s always looking for ways to push the creative envelope and give her clients the very best work.

Vanessa Warheit

Climate Policy Strategist

A true artist, an incredible photographer, videographer, musician, photoshop guru. It is a rare person who is highly skilled, creative, and fun to work with.

David Bircham

Creative Director & Graphic Designer

I grew up trailing square dancers, and it left me thinking sideways.