Damir Kotorić
Designer
Location
Geelong, Victoria, Australia
Toptal Member Since
January 13, 2020
Damir is a multidisciplinary digital designer with a decade of international experience—designing digital products for companies in Australia, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States. He has designed open data portals for Australian state governments, payments at Booking.com, the search experience at Envato Market, facilitated design sprint workshops with professors at Harvard, taught as the lead UX instructor at General Assembly, and led AR/VR design at Archimedes Digital.
Damir is available for hire
Hire DamirPortfolio
Orpheus – Archiving for the Digital Humanities
Product StrategyDigital Product DesignDesign ThinkingUX FlowsLanding Page DesignAugmented Reality (AR)+ 20 more
Work Experience
2018 - PRESENT
Independent Digital Product Designer
Damir Kotoric
- Designed open data portals for Australian state governments.
- Facilitated remote design thinking using Google's Design Sprint methodology, helping clients to narrow in on a vision for their product, as well as the initial prototype.
- Created an AR app design, servicing professors in the digital humanities fields at Harvard University.
Technologies: JavaScript, CSS, HTML, Miro, Figma, Augmented Reality (AR), UI Design, Prototyping, Product Design, UX Design, Mobile Design, UI Libraries, Design Systems
2021 - 2023
Product Designer
Nametag
- Completed top-to-bottom design of Nametag, including UI/UX for the Nametag website and the browser extension.
- Advised on the product roadmap, implementing features while keeping scope low, and going to market as fast as possible.
- Oversaw QA and mentored a junior QA tester to help implement design mockups correctly.
- Testimonial: "Damir is a brilliant designer who understands how to merge a beautiful and functional UX with business goals. What impressed us most about Damir was his willingness to meet all of our tight deadlines, and nothing was ever too hard." – Bradley Zarich.
Technologies: UI Design, UX Design, Accessible Design, Web3, Blockchain, MetaMask, Cryptocurrency Wallets, Cryptocurrency Payments, Browser Plugins, Prototyping, Product Design, Mobile Design, Figma, UI Libraries, Design Systems
2018 - 2019
Lead Product Strategist | Product Designer
Archimedes Digital
- Created the agency's website and Orphe.us, a digital archiving product for the humanities.
- Led remote design workshops with clients based on Google's Design Sprint methodology and helped to translate a client's vision into a design and a prototype.
- Designed AR apps for archaeologists using this technology to showcase their excavations.
- Helped Harvard professors with the creation of an ambitious publishing platform to act as the central source for academic commentaries.
- Collaborated with museums in China to create museum AR apps to help navigate visitors, explain artworks, and bring them to life using animations.
- Designed and tested an AR app for the Giza archaeological plateau in Egypt.
- Created a design system in Figma, built the UI library in Storybook, and handled the subsequent integration into the React codebase.
- Designed 360° web tours to make archaeological sites accessible to an online audience.
- Testimonial: "Damir is one of the best designers I have worked with in my 10+ year career as a web developer." – Daniel Rekshan, a senior front-end engineer at Archimedes Digital.
Technologies: Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), React Native, React, JavaScript, CSS, HTML, Miro, Figma, UI Design, Prototyping, Product Design, UX Design, Mobile Design, UI Libraries, Design Systems
2017 - 2018
UX Designer
Booking.com
- Increased conversion by 2,423 daily bookings, equaling an estimated €35 million annually. My work focused on accessibility, performance, and the payment UX on Booking.com —the world's 3rd-biggest eCommerce site at the time.
- Conducted A/B testing and formed a design rationale on solid data. Every design iteration was A/B tested and only incorporated if the analytics data showed an improvement to the website.
- Worked on the performance team with the responsibility of improving the speed and low-connectivity experience of the Booking.com mobile website.
- Performed accessibility testing using screen readers and browser tools to simulate impairments and assisted in design and development work to make the core Booking.com experience WCAG-compliant.
- Testimonial: "Damir has excellent design acumen (in and outside of code), an uncompromising dedication to ethics, and a drive to elevate products to their greatest potential." – Christopher Sledge, UX designer at Booking.com.
- Testimonial: "His ideas are never, ever, ever boring." – Fiorella Rizzà, senior UX copywriter at Booking.com.
Technologies: MURAL, JavaScript, CSS, HTML, Usertesting.com, Sketch, Figma, UI Design, Prototyping, Product Design, UX Design, Mobile Design, UI Libraries, Design Systems
2016 - 2016
Lead UX Instructor
General Assembly
- Helped launch new design careers as a lead UX instructor. All 18 of my students succeeded in landing design roles—some at Australia's top companies like Telstra, PwC, MYOB, and Monash College.
- Taught everything from project analysis, research, journey mapping, service blueprint, information architecture, content strategy, Lean and Agile processes, prototyping, user testing, and the importance of stakeholder management and collaboration.
- Encouraged and got industry peers to come and deliver guest presentations on digital marketing, copywriting, agile, and product management.
- Testimonial: "In his time at GA as UX lead instructor, Damir was an extremely conscientious and attentive colleague. Highly empathetic and measured, which made him an excellent mentor to students on their UX journey." – Matthew Johnson, program producer at GA.
Technologies: InVision, Sketch, Apple Keynote, Figma, UI Design, Mobile UX, Corporate Culture, Lean Startups, Prototyping, Product Design, UX Design, Mobile Design, UI Libraries, Design Systems
2016 - 2016
Senior Product Designer
Creative.ai
- Helped a European artificial intelligence/machine learning startup get up and running by providing full-service digital innovation—from product vision, user research, design thinking workshops, interactive prototypes, and testing.
- Created a concept for an innovative mood-boarding app that helps creatives define a project's art direction using machine learning.
- Designed a machine learning prototype, which auto-generated graphic designs based on a brief and user input. Essentially designed AI bots to create simple graphic design deliverables like banners and logos.
- Testimonial: "Damir is a one-of-a-kind excellent designer with a real sense for the product." – Roelof Pieters, CEO at Creative.ai.
Technologies: jQuery, CSS, HTML, Adobe Suite, InVision, Sketch, AI Design, UI Design, Prototyping, Product Design, UX Design, Mobile Design, Figma, UI Libraries, Design Systems
2013 - 2016
UX Designer
Envato
- Acted as lead search UX designer on Envato Market, the company's flagship product, earning millions of dollars monthly by conducting competitor research, remote and in-field user research, design sprint ideation, prototyping, and user testing.
- Assisted in the company's largest user research effort to date by talking to customers from dozens of countries around the world and then distributing video summaries of insights to all 100+ employees in the company's product team.
- Established myself as a designer/coder, someone who could quickly turn a business idea into a prototype, helping launch one major project and two smaller projects that otherwise would have had difficulty getting funded.
- Spent over one year creating and executing a brand new search experience, overhauling the previous faceted search experience.
- Designed and developed a prototype that converted 48x more stock photographs than the existing product. The success of this prototype was then used to aim for a more ambitious redesign of the flagship product.
- Testimonial: "Damir is a great all-round designer. Keen to get his hands dirty in all aspects of the role from assisting with research [through] to running workshops and writing code." – Chris Thelwell, head of UX at Envato.
Technologies: Ruby on Rails (RoR), JavaScript, Sass, CSS, HTML, Axure, Optimal Workshop, Adobe Creative Suite, InVision, Sketch, UI Design, Prototyping, Product Design, UX Design, Mobile Design, Figma, UI Libraries, Design Systems
2009 - 2013
Digital Designer | Developer
Choc Chip Digital
- Acted as the jack-of-all-trades at a design agency servicing Australian businesses and tourism organizations.
- Championed a new collaborative design effort with clients, which would later evolve into the design sprint facilitation that I lead nowadays.
- Testimonial: "Damir's work as a designer and front-end web developer is excellent." – James Crook, founder of Choc Chip Digital.
Technologies: JavaScript, CSS, HTML, Sketch, Adobe Creative Suite, UI Design, Prototyping, Product Design, UX Design, Mobile Design, Figma, UI Libraries, Design Systems
2009 - 2009
Digital Designer | Developer
Salvation Army Employment Plus
- Fulfilled a nine-month contract designing and developing prototypes of e-learning systems for job applicants and intranet design at TSAEP headquarters in Melbourne.
- Created a web prototype of the new e-learning system using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, which was used to spearhead the buy-in from upper management to approve the complete build of the project.
- Testimonial: "Damir's work as a designer and front-end web developer is excellent." – Glenn Hansen, National Learning and Development manager at TSAEP.
Technologies: JavaScript, CSS, HTML, Adobe Creative Suite, UI Design, Prototyping, Product Design, UX Design, Mobile Design, Figma, UI Libraries, Design Systems
Other Experience
Publication
The Past Is Still Present – An Overview of Timeless Design
https://www.toptal.com/designers/ux/timeless-design
Publication
The Future of User Interface Design: Next-generation UI Tools
https://www.toptal.com/designers/ui/future-ui-design
Publication
Don’t Always Champion the User: How to Balance Business Priorities and UX
https://www.toptal.com/designers/ux/champion-user
Education
2005 - 2008
Bachelor's Degree (Honors) in Business Information Technology
Deakin University - Geelong, Australia
