If you’re looking for the best picture of my skills outside of an interview, this is it. I’ve outlined the highlights of my skill-set in no particular order.
Creating a usable message and a delightful experience is the culmination of all this experience. I apply techniques for great vertical rhythm, symmetry and asymmetry, gestalt principles, chunking, and metaphor to create unique but recognizable interaction design.
I’m especially adept at extracting business needs from stakeholders and translating them to user goals. I can perform comprehensive cognitive or heuristic evaluation of existing software; providing invaluable feedback and a way forward when redesigning problem areas.
Wayfinding and information architecture are my strong suit and I rely on a unique mastery of language to be able to guide users through information.
I have extensive experience creating and evaluating prototypes before execution. I believe in using tools like UXPin and Adobe XD to shave precious time off of app development processes. I excel at providing accurate representations before a build to sort through usability issues and use cases prior to first code whether wireframe or prototype. My greatest example was creating the entire web and mobile apps for LotTalk in prototype before starting development.
I excel at creating visual designs and layout that work well as code. I use the mobile-first approach to simplify and unify concepts so they’re easy to render on mobile, tablet and desktop. Instead of using device breakpoints, I tune the interface to react well at all screen sizes.
Firehost (now Armour) is one of many efforts where I was responsible for making all of the responsive design decisions in visual layout and code. For EvenUp, I captured there entire webapp in responsive code to take pressure off their native mobile app initiatives.
I’ve been a life-long user of the Adobe Creative Suite so I have particularly advanced skills creating in Photoshop and Illustrator. InDesign and Acrobat are no sweat for PDF or even print materials. I’m a commercial artist and I spend my energy creating balanced and well colored artwork rather than stretching toward the wild edge of my creativity. I find that most projects require a measured dose of realism, speed and out-of-the-box thinking.
I created a team of 4 designers and UXers working remotely out of Lima Peru that I used to tackle 10s of projects throughout at 7 year period. This taught me the nuances of running projects, motivating creative professionals and collaborating with some of the best technical teams on different sides of the globe. Live and in person - I’ve lead teams as large as 9 and as small as 2 to tackle all sorts of web, mobile and social challenges. I’ve worked closely with executive teams to establish business requirements and turn those into fantastic applications. Over the course of my career, I’ve worked in-house, as a consultant, fully remote and a blend of all three formats.
Though my experience has taught me how to lead, I love working individually and autonomously creating pixel perfect designs and code.
I spent a couple of years of my career working specifically with ecommerce websites. This included designing from scratch, and leading teams to perform conversion optimized redesigns. I’m familiar with single page checkouts, urgency hints, and all of the small-scale fundamentals from cross-sell techniques to split testing. I’m particularly interested in conversion optimization.
Every problem has a solution, work-around, or new method that spells victory. I have a curious mind and finding solutions no matter what the challenge is enjoyable to me. I don’t limit myself to names like “graphic artist” or “front-ender” when I tackle what needs to be done. I’ve solved a thousand problems using new techniques that I had to learn on the job and I appreciate this opportunity to learn.
I love working with writers… if only to hone my own writing technique. I’m comfortable writing copy of any sort and I have a driven interest in language. I can generate guide or micro-copy easily to make an interface more usable and understandable. I’ve also worked in multilingual environments and our app EvenUp was presented in both Spanish and English. Translation was an interesting intellectual exercise from both a language and technical solution standpoint. I engineered this translation mechanism using Angular.
Remote work requires strong skills in personal motivation and time management. I’ve worked remotely for probably 15 of the 20 years of my career. It’s what I prefer and I’m damn good at personal productivity by now. I excel at written communication via slack and email but I’m quick to jump on video conferences or just the phone to solve problems fast.
I’ve also found efficiency being time-flexible having worked with many people in South America, India and across the US. I’m comfortable working 8+ hours a day at any time during the day or night to keep team and project cohesion.
I believe it requires unique communication skills to thrive in the remote work environment and I’m confident that I bring an outsized level of productivity under remote conditions by being communicative, available and accountable.
I’m deeply familiar with a git, npm and webstorm powered workflow. I’m familiar with gulp, grunt, bower, webpack and babel. I’m more than comfortable plying my trade in React and Angular environments as well as standard client server apps. Sass, less and other transpiled presentation languages like CoffeeScript are no problem. I’ve even implemented my fair share of Greensock to handle animation and Jasmine for code testing.
To me writing clean front-end code is essential for maintainability. I evaluate the cost of complexity, semantically name elements, and refine my approach to use the least amount of code to achieve the most compatible result.
I believe in this art. Well architected front-end code makes an outsized difference in its maintainability, load-time and the time it takes for other developers to ramp in.
I start with frameworks and resets that zero out browser inefficiencies. Then I use a deep knowledge of mixins, variables and formulas in sass or less to create the most minimal and maintainable presentation layer possible.
I'm comfortable instrumenting code for analytics packages as well as optimizing with schema and social tags. My knowledge of the standards at play makes this second nature. I’ve also applied accessibility principles to many of the web apps I’ve created where budget and need aligned.
I’m familiar with standard AWS, Google and cloud environments. Even Jenkins and Vagrant. I can control servers and deployments via command line and instrument an environment for health checks, automated reporting and analytics. I enjoy automating tasks with Zapier, Codedeploy and Data Pipeline. I’m highly familiar with CloudFront, Route53, EC2 and of course S3. Most of my experience here is with AWS though I’ve hooked into Googles APIs plenty too.
Email is quite a different animal. I have tons of experience coding HTML 3.1 compatible messages including coding iCal format from scratch. I’ve used Litmus and Email on Acid for compatibility testing and I’m familiar with a wide range of client compatibility issues and delivery hurdles. Responsive email is in well within my wheelhouse.
I have an all Apple workflow. I bring with me a iMac Pro with a Wacom tablet attached for heavy lifting graphic and design work. I use an iPad Pro to sketch, draw, paint and custom letter. My Macbook is my standby for code. I’m so familiar with my toolset it takes me no time to ramp in and produce high quality results.
I virtualize PCs using Virtual Box to assure I can test compatibility across all platforms. I use Genymotion and Samsung hardware to test on Android. I’m kinda a nut about compatibility. I believe you’re not good until everyone can render your interfaces.
I can create works in print, video and audio as well. I’m comfortable processing, formatting and editing basically anything you throw at me. I’ve handled medium to small scale video production workflows from a videography, audio production and editing standpoint.
I’m a professional videographer who’s comfortable in a 4K workflow with everything from LUTs, Lumetri, After Effects, Audition (audio post production) and I consider myself extremely proficient with Premiere. Media encoding, containers and compatibility help me understand just how to implement video media on the web. In my spare time I mess around with my A7Sii and to DJI drones.
I bring a really unique set of skills and experiences to any team I work for. I read constantly to improve and I’m a life-long learner. I’m a balanced communicator who doesn’t let mood affect results. And I can use these skills to create outsized results in varied and challenging environments.
Reach out and we’ll see if that’s a good fit for you.
I've consulted on hundreds of efforts large and small across a diverse set of industries and products; agency and direct. Here are some of the firms who've grown along with me.