Sarah Semark Email & Phone Number

Edinburgh, United Kingdom

Lead branding, marketing, visual and product design, as well as strategic direction and project management for independent and freelance projects. Art direction, visual & product design. User research, wireframing, prototyping. Design systems, open source, front-end development. Writing, marketing, social media.Handled a variety of freelance projects for clients such as Tim Ferris, ATypI, Hugh Howey, Om Malik, Progressive Shopper, Sheena Iyengar, Smitten Kitchen, WertCo. Tasks spanned between design, development, marketing, and product management.

Led design & development of new products. Facilitated exercises to collaboratively develop a product roadmap. Responsible for tracking and ensuring progress against milestones. Built wireframes, prototypes, and user flows. Audited patterns and implemented design systems. Led user research efforts across a team of twenty-five in the open-source project. Contributed to both open-source and proprietary projects shipped to millions of users.Designed and developed WordPress themes that are active on over 1 million individual sites. Contributed to _s, a starter theme used by millions of WordPress themes.Worked with a variety of different clients, including Smitten Kitchen, Heather Meeker, Just One Tree, Feminist Frequency, and Joel on Software to design, build, and maintain custom websites.Worked on an innovation team exploring emerging technologies and developing new products and patterns.

Canada

Worked with over ninety clients on hundreds of projects ranging from logos and business cards to packaging and book covers. Designed and developed over 100 websites on platforms ranging from custom WordPress installations to developer-built frameworks.In addition to design and development, did copywriting, illustration, photography, project management, technical writing, documentation, accounting, and marketing.Responsible for all aspects of a project, from sourcing stock imagery and custom illustration to ensuring that development runs smoothly and copy is well-crafted. Managed client expectations, controlled scope creep, planned timelines, and juggled multiple deadlines and projects.Responsible for the selection, hiring, and management of freelance illustration, development, and writing talents. Coordinated projects with team members distributed around the globe.Provided technical support to ongoing clients. Set up, maintained, and managed an optimized VPS to provide premium hosting to clients. Involved with Ladies Learning Code as a technical mentor.

Responsible for designing and implementing graphical interfaces for various gaming platforms.Designed and implemented GUIs for various gaming platforms. Worked within a three-person graphic design team on Rugby 2006.Took sole responsibility for all frontend design on Cricket 2007.Liased with programmers in order to create efficient methods for frontend implementation.Worked with proprietary technologies (XML-based) and Flash’s APT engine.

Wrote articles (reviews, cultural commentary, politics) for an online magazine. This was one of my favourite jobs & I still think I'm lucky to have had it while everyone else was busy flipping burgers.

Diploma, Graphic Design

Journalism/Fyp

Accepted to the Journalism program with the Garfield Weston Merit Scholarship. Completed my first year of study and moved on to community.

Literary Arts