Rhys Thomas Email & Phone Number

Arborfield Cross, Gb

Woking, England, United Kingdom

I lead overarching creative approaches to digital products and services. Putting on my 'Head of UX' hat, I push for features and functionality that would improve our user experience. As design lead, I challenge the team to push boundaries, to really get under the skin of a project, leaving no grey areas. I provide subject matter expert knowledge to business development conversations, and outline our value proposition on pitches. I have defined what new strategic creative services look like, resulting in additional revenue streams. And I show the value of my expertise through thought leadership pieces, delivering webinars and cross-team collaboration.Fulfilling an art director role and a team lead role, my responsibilities are very fluid. I'm always involved in; creative process streamlining, product improvement, lead-gen creative webinars, quality gatekeeping, estimating, managing direct reports, workload distribution, project planning, reviews, 1-1s, mentoring, shaping workplace culture.My 'design people' mantras - Always reserve time for 1-1s. Information hierarchy is in everything. UX is everywhere. Be passionate, diligent and proactive.

Woking, England, United Kingdom

The VerseOne design team was growing, and needed an established senior designer to hit the ground running, lead the design direction and monitor the quality of the creative output.

Slough, United Kingdom

Senior Creative Designer - I led and implemented Creative Services that included:- Design consultation [OMRON US]- UX audits [Construction Software]- Cart redesigns [LenovoPro, Nuance]- In-product renewal flow [Kaspersky]- UI site tools/enhancements [OMRON US product compatibility, Wagner support hub]- Integrated cross-channel promos with ESPs [Kaspersky APAC quiz, Logitech MS]- Site optimization [Trend Micro, Nuance, Kaspersky]- Key large-scale revenue-driving campaigns [Logitech(holiday, back to school), Kaspersky (EOL)]I operated independently to estimate work, apply due processes, manage Jira and Wrike statuses, present to clients and work through feedback for go-live. I mentored associate designers, conducted peer reviews and acted as a technical / creative intermediary between teams.

Slough, United Kingdom

Creative Designer - I designed and built marketing creatives such as microsites, landing pages, triggered and campaign emails and 2d graphics for; Lenovo, Nokia, Sennheiser, Nuance, Trend Micro, Razer, Jabra, Logitech, Norton, Kaspersky and Avast. Across; Paid Search, Email, Display and Affiliate. I also headed up the internal social committee to arrange office events.

Reading, United Kingdom

Whilst at Mudvark (a small independent games studio), we produced an educational tablet game for 10-14yr olds. I was the Principle Designer, responsible for the interaction design, level design, sound design, dialogue/educational content writing, storyboarding and documentation. I worked closely with the Unity developer, 3d artist and product owner to deliver milestone updates to the stakeholders and action feedback from user testing sessions.

Reading, United Kingdom

Moving to the Yell Premium design team allowed me to work on larger accounts, designing and building Yell's flagship products without the price-sensitive restrictions of the other offerings. During this period I contributed to the migration of 50,000+ sites to a new CMS after extensive testing in the pioneer group. Because of my depth of system knowledge and work ethic, I covered workload distribution for the team, as well as troubleshooting for design and tech issues across the department.By the end of my Yell career, I had designed or built over 300 websites across 3 different major CMS.

Reading, United Kingdom

Design-specific QA for the Yellsites product. Internal gatekeeping to ensure a high degree of design fidelity and surpassing customer expectations. This often meant amending, tweaking and improving a mock whilst being sympathetic to the original artist's choices. I would compile any feedback to the product team and lead regular training sessions on design practices with our off-shore design and development teams.

Reading, United Kingdom

QA before the distribution of the Yellsite Standard product to the customer. Ensuring everything complied with our high standards and all customer requests were carried out as closely as possible.

1St, Games Design

Foundation Diploma, Art & Design