poplar.money

A colleague and I formed a multimedia company that focused on being a “one stop shop” business model. This allowed our clients to get their design, development, and videography needs met all under one roof. I worked through all aspects of starting and managing a business such as creating an organizational structure, payment procedures, contracts, accounting, and client management systems. As an owner and employee I had to play many different roles that included leading the UX team through the research and discovery phases, creating user personas and journey maps, creating proof of concepts and wireframes, and establishing an overall brand strategy. As a UI designer I had to ensure that all design tenants were being met and that files were properly organized for a clean handoff to our development team. As a video producer and editor I was constantly planning shoots, organizing a team and filming subjects that ranged from corporate interviews all the way to live event coverage in front of thousands of people. In post production I would oversee a lot of the motion graphics for our video pieces. This would range from designing lower third titles for interviews all the way to 3D renders for product showcases and presentations. On the development side I would help our developers with a lot of the CSS/HTML work for our company site as well as our forward facing client sites that were usually hosted on a custom wordpress or drupal framework. One of my biggest roles came in the form of client relations. I would meet with the clients walk them through a discovery and strategy session to ensure that my team had all the necessary requirements as well as a project road map to establish deliverable deadlines. During the projects I would communicate with the clients in order to be as collaborative as possible and ultimately bring the client a more satisfying finished product.

I was hired as a User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI) designer to strengthen and lead a design team here at Buckit Media in order to bring in more big name creative work. At Buckit my main responsibilities are centered around the user experience for client websites. I meet with the clients and lead them along with our team through the discovery and strategy phases in order to understand the clients needs and how we can best help them grow and enhance their business. After assessing the clients needs and establishing a clear project plan I then get to work leading our designers through user personas and journey maps so we can establish the needs and goals of the end users. Once that is clearly defined I then move on to sketching and proofing out concepts that eventually lead to well defined wireframes that we can showcase to the client for approval through tools such as UX Pin. After the client signs off I move into creating the assets that will make up our user interface. Focusing on our design tenants in place I am able create high resolution assets that are not only aligned with today’s current trends but also centered around what the end user needs to see. When the client approves the design I then oversee the hand off of all our design assets as well as a detailed styleguide for our development team to use. This ensures that everyone is collaborative and communication is seamless throughout the project.

My Colleagues and I formed a non-profit organization that focused on creating visual stories to inform, inspire and encourage individuals to become involved in their community. Project C was a collaborative campaign within the community with a simple mission to drive awareness to very important issues within the local Healthcare, Education, Environmental sectors. I then led a team of 30 designers, videographers, journalists and developers that went out into the community and filmed documentaries that were then hosted on our custom built website. Our custom designed and developed website hosted those amazing stories and allowed other members of community to discover and share our videos, photos, interactive infographics, and more.  Visitors to the site also had the power to vote on their favorite piece and donate as well. After the voting period ended all the donations we received from individuals and community sponsors were divided up across the stories based on the percentage of votes they received and sent out to our local non-profit partners to help fund programs that were covered in each story. All of this was planned and executed in a 10 week time frame at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio.

Led a team of designers and developers that worked on both local and international client websites and marketing campaigns. Working with the design team I would oversee the strategy and research phases to better define and enhance the overall user experience for our custom client websites. After the user experience was defined and proofed out I would work directly with our designers to ensure that the creation of our user interface assets were ready to handoff to our team of developers. Once the handoff was complete I would then oversee all facets of the development including HTML/CSS creation as well as any PHP.