Ilya Sizov
Verified Expert in Design
Designer
New York, NY, United States
Toptal member since May 11, 2020
Ilya is a digital designer with over a decade of experience in UI/UX, brand, and web design. His expertise spans digital agencies—where he worked with clients such as Unilever, Panasonic, and WWF—to fast-paced international startups, where he led marketing and product design. Passionate about crafting engaging experiences, Ilya combines aesthetic finesse with strategic design to create visually compelling and highly functional solutions.
Work Experience
Design Lead
Smartcat
- Revised and solidified the brand identity and built cohesive and scalable guidelines to be used across all marketing communications (social media, newsletters, and banner campaigns).
- Created the design system for the company’s marketing website that allows building new pages easily. Thanks to this easier process and mobile-friendly design system, the website traffic doubled, rising from 50,000 to 110,000+ unique visitors monthly.
- Redesigned the newsletter templates and collaborated with developers to establish an easy-to-implement email component system.
- Implemented web UI improvements and visual guidelines for the company’s blog—helping it to grow the audience from 4,000 to 58,000 in 10 months.
- Led the super-fast design of identity, website, emails, and other marketing materials for LocFromHome—the biggest online conference in the industry (2,340 attendees from 97 countries, 34 speakers, and 12 hours of non-stop streaming).
Founding Designer
XPlace
- Designed the XPlace product as a digital identity hub for video game professionals, blending job discovery, networking, and portfolio-building. Designed a UI that reflects gaming aesthetics while maintaining professional usability.
- Designed the brand’s dark-themed, neon-accented visual identity to resonate with gaming culture. Streamlined the brand's marketing presence and product appearance by establishing a consistent visual language.
- Built a robust design system with shared variables for typography, color, and layout, ensuring consistency and scalability across the evolving platform while supporting rapid product iterations.
- Defined user flows and architecture for the platform’s MVP, iterating through extensive wireframing and UX testing. Focused on intuitive navigation, professional storytelling, and user engagement.
- Designed and launched TheXPlace’s promotional website, event branding, and marketing assets. Continuously refined the company’s visual identity to align with product growth and industry positioning.
Design Director
Fasten
- Led the complete overhaul of the mobile app for iOS and Android. The app has been downloaded over 1 million times since its launch and has over 50,000 monthly active users.
- Redesigned the marketing website to align it with the values of the company and communicate the new approach to ride-hailing where the driver’s happiness was the priority and everyone benefited from it.
- Revised and updated the company identity guidelines to make the visual language more consistent, scalable, and easy to use.
- Art-directed numerous advertising campaigns, both online and offline, seen by hundreds of thousands of people. That included the remarkable marketing campaign of Fasten being the main SXSW-2017 ride-hailing partner.
- Led the improvements of the drivers’ app which included user research, user interviews, and quantitative data research alongside rethinking and redesigning the app for riders.
Art Director
Red Keds Creative Agency
- Art directed and designed Paratype.com—the biggest worldwide online store for Cyrillic fonts (selling over 1,000 fonts). Oversaw the UX research, the creative concept, and the UI design of the website.
- Designed the Range Rover Evoque test drive experience. We built a new concept of a test drive that replaced regular registration with RFID technology. That turned a regular test drive into a party and involved more than 3000 participants.
- Art-directed the multiplayer browser game for Unilever. It was a fully-featured browser gaming experience that required the coordination of multiple creative specialists, including game designers, copywriters, illustrators, and interface designers.
- Played a critical role in building the agency’s annual conference about digital marketing and design: “Digital Silicone-free”—one of the most rewarded in the industry.
- Worked as a senior art director, contributed to building a unique design team, and led educational initiatives inside the agency that helped more than ten designers to thrive and do compelling work.
Education
Curator of the UX/UI Design Course in Creativity and Advertising
The School of Creative Thinking IKRA - Moscow, Russia
Postgraduate Diploma in Graphic Design
British Higher School of Art and Design - Moscow, Russia
Ph.D. in Philosophy
Moscow State University - Moscow, Russia
Skills
Tools
Sketch, Principle, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Apple Keynote, Google Workspace, InVision, Figma Component Library, Adobe After Effects, Zeplin, Tumult Hype, Cinema 4D
Platforms
Figma, Web, Webflow, iOS, Android, Mobile
Industry Expertise
Advertising, Education, Transportation & Shipping
Languages
CSS, HTML
Other
Web Design, User Experience (UX), Websites, Wireframing, UX Design, Component Libraries, Web App UX, UI Animation, Web UI, Web UX, Responsive Web Design (RWD), Landing Page Design, Website Redesign, Product Design, Mobile App UI, Web UI Design, UI Design, Creative Industry, Ad Campaigns, Landing Pages, Graphic Design, Branding, User Interface (UI), Marketing Design, Visual Design, Brand Design, Logo Design, Graphics, Typography, Visual Hierarchy, Website Design, Color Theory, UX Prototyping, User Experience Design, Marketplaces, UI Prototyping, UX Wireframes, Corporate Identity, Digital Creative Direction, Social Media, Social Media Advertising, Presentation Design, Brand Books, Color Schemes, Logotype, Design Systems, Mobile UI, Mobile App Design, Tablet UI, User Flows, User Research, Animation, Marketplace Design, Motion Design, SaaS Design, B2B, Diagrams, Icon Design, Information Design, 3D Design, Brand Awareness, Enterprise SaaS, P2P, User Experience Strategy, eCommerce UI, eCommerce UX, LinkedIn Ads, Creative Direction, Squarespace, Presentations, Startups, Rideshare Services, Web Marketing, Portal Websites, UI Guidelines, Prototyping, Mobile UX Design, Mobile UX, Mobile UI Design, Mobile Apps, UI Style Guides, Web Fonts, Type Design, eCommerce, Web App Design, Online Shopping, Shopping Carts, Design Guidelines, UI Components, Web Portals, Web App UI, Identity Design, Visual Identity, Interactive Prototypes, Nonprofits, Advertising Campaigns, Advertising Design, Digital Advertising, Environment, Midjourney, Art Direction, Creative Problem Solving, UX Strategy, Brand Positioning, Sociology, Consumer-facing Product Design, Video Games, Marketplace Platforms, Responsive Web Apps, Identity, Brand Identity, Brand Guidelines, Keynote Templates
Experience
- Web Design - 15 years
- Landing Pages - 10 years
- Motion Design - 8 years
- Figma - 8 years
- Mobile App Design - 8 years
- Product Design - 8 years
- Adobe After Effects - 6 years
- Design Systems - 5 years
Tools
- Adobe After Effects
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