Damir Kotorić
Verified Expert in Design
Designer
Bell Park, Victoria, Australia
Toptal member since January 13, 2020
Damir is a multidisciplinary digital designer with 15 years of experience and Fortune 500 expertise. He designed open data portals for Australian state governments, the mobile payments user experience at Booking.com, and the search experience at Envato Market. Damir also led AR design efforts on digital humanities projects for professors at Harvard University, taught as the lead UX instructor at General Assembly, and led design efforts for startups around the world.
Portfolio
Work Experience
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Education
Bachelor's Degree (Honors) in Business Information Technology
Deakin University - Geelong, Australia
Skills
Tools
Figma, Adobe Creative Suite Design, Git, iOS Design, Usertesting.com, Zapier Development, Jira, Confluence, GitHub, Xcode, Android Design, Git, Graphic Design
Languages
HTML, CSS
Platforms
iOS Design, Mobile App Design, Web Design, Android Design, Visual Studio Development, Webflow Design, Shopify, Adobe Creative Suite Design, WordPress Design
Industry Expertise
Creative Tech, Tech Freelancing, Consumer Products, Retail & Wholesale, Health & Wellness, Events, Professional Services, Marketing Design, Automotive
Other
UX Design, Web Design, Landing Page Design, UX Design, UI Design, Design Systems, Data Visualization Design, AI Design, Digital Payments, User Testing, QA Testing, UI Design, Responsive Design, Mobile App Design, Mobile App Design, UX Design, Mobile App, UI Design, User Research, Prototyping, Conceptual Design, Design Thinking, Workshop Facilitation, Design Sprints, Product Reviews, Product Design, Typeform.io, Remote User Testing, UX Design, Lean Canvas, Feature Roadmaps, Mobile App Design, Roadmaps, CRO, E-commerce Website Design, Tailwind CSS, Web UX Design, Enterprise Development, UX Design, UI Design, Dashboard Design, User Flow Design, Visual Design, Wireframing, Web App Design, Mobile UX Design, SaaS Design, App UX, Design Consulting, UX Review, SaaS Design, B2B Design, Startup Development, Dashboard, SaaS Design, Color Palettes, UI Prototyping, Mobile App Design, Discovery Workshops, Layout Design, Landing Pages, Mobile UI Design, Responsive Web Design, Heuristic Analysis, Edtech Design, Interaction Design (IxD), Colleges & Universities, Social Networks, Mockups, Web Application, Stakeholder Management, Agile Design, User Validation, Mockups, UX Wireframes, Customer Journeys, Web UI Design, Web Design, System Design, UI Design, E-commerce UX Design, Marketplace Design, DataViz, Material UI, Layout, E-commerce Website Design, Enterprise SaaS, Marketplace Design, B2C, Market Research Analyst, Web UI, User Journeys, Responsive Web Development, Mockups, Design, Component Libraries, Corporate Websites, UX Design, Interactive Design, Microinteraction Design, Web Design, Conversational Interfaces, MVP Design, Web App Design, Generative Design, Image Generation, Text to Image AI, Online Payments, Usability, Progressive Web Applications (PWAs), Multilingual Design, Accessibility Development, Competitor Analysis & Profiling, Augmented Reality Design, VR Design, Motion & Animation Design, Android Design, A/B Testing, Analytics Development, Survey Design, Information Architecture, Conversion-driven UX, UX Design, Persona Design, Product Strategy, Accessible Web Design, Website Performance, Developer Experience (DX), Web3, Blockchain, Branding, Typography, Fintech Development, Brand Design, Design Leadership, Service Design, UX Design, UX Design, User Stories, Team Management, Copywriting, Content-first Design & Development, AI Design, Graphic Design, Finance, Workshops, React Native, VR Design, UX Design, User Onboarding, Gamification Design, Digital Humanities, Front-end Development, Mobile App Design, REST API, Rapid Prototyping, Mobile Apps, Virtual Tours, Tourism, Reading Interfaces, Machine Learning, Creative Industry, Museums & Exhibits, Digital Product Design, App Reviews, Mobile App Design, Open Data, Big Data UX, UX Strategy, React.js, Video Editing, Product Launch Strategy, Optimal Workshop, Service Blueprints, Storybook, MetaMask, Cryptocurrency Wallets, Cryptocurrency Payments, Browser Plugins, UI Design, Business Analysis Consulting, Human-computer Interaction (HCI), Lean Startups, Print Design, Logo Design, Wearables, Web Dashboards, Framer, ChatGPT, Midjourney, Content Management Systems (CMS), Learning Management Systems (LMS), Shopify Design, Data Analysis, SEO Content, CRM Design
Experience
Tools
How to Work with Toptal
Toptal matches you directly with global industry experts from our network in hours—not weeks or months.
Share your needs
Choose your talent
Start your risk-free talent trial
Top talent is in high demand.
Start hiring