Ludvik Herrera
Verified Expert in Design
Designer
West Fargo, ND, United States
Toptal member since January 19, 2022
Ludvik is a creative catalyst, hands-on strategist, and experience designer. Through research and user-centric design principles, he applies the design thinking methodology. Ludvik crafts intuitive user experiences, creates and enhances branding, makes engaging digital products and visual presentations, and architects atomic design systems. He is insatiably curious, loves to learn, and often finds improvement and innovation on any challenge. Ludvik enjoys sharing knowledge and helping others.
Portfolio
Work Experience
Senior UX/UI Designer
Benjamin Moore
- Designed the flow and UI of a mobile app to sort through paint chips and show a visual gallery for paint and stain projects.
- Built a design system primer using variables in Figma to make their current component system more efficient and incremental.
- Researched interactive patterns and CTA positioning to improve sales and promotions of the company's products.
- Designed the user flow diagrams for a shopping cart experience to make purchasing products more intuitive and effortless by using information architecture principles and human navigation patterns.
Design and UX Principal
Nüpolitan
- Conducted surveys and on-the-field observation for research and to plan user journey maps for a regional nonprofit donation portal that gathered $13 million in a single donation day.
- Designed the UX journey map and responsive front-end web design of a service that handles communications for people who are incarcerated.
- Built several brands, style guides, and branding campaigns, which included color usage and intent, typography, logo marks and logotypes, language and tone, and several collateral materials and assets.
- Built multiple websites with a CMS based on ExpressionEngine to handle responsive and adaptive themes and layouts, marketing promotions, and taxonomy structures.
- Created several visual design graphics and pitch presentation decks to promote, convince, and generate interest with branding and marketing campaigns.
- Facilitated design thinking workshops and activities to gather research and provide innovation opportunities for various products and services. Built design workflows and processes to make efficient design sprints and product roadmaps.
- Created a letterpress calendar that helped with marketing promotions. The challenge was to understand the type of paper and how the ink plates would be combined and to create a leave-behind product.
- Created SVG animations and a UI design system for an enterprise solutions website that houses technical and software development services with more than 200+ software engineers.
- Designed and created a scalable design solution for a nonprofit handbook that consisted of digital assets and a custom printed manual system that could scale from a 6x9 portable manual to a full letter size bound handbook.
- Designed a newsletter and its template that accommodated themes and multiple editorial layouts in one single scalable Adobe InDesign document for a monthly healthcare niche publication.
Senior UX Designer
Adobe + Deluxe
- Designed a microsite for the Deluxe community and outreach program by integrating their then-current Adobe Experience Manager design system and adding two more to their components library, a statistics component and a sub-navigation component.
- Gathered and assigned a taxonomy system for their design system's component library to organize a company-wide AEM design system.
- Created three design system components for their design system library: An FAQ component, a sidebar component, and a tiles component. These fluid and scalable components helped their enterprise-wide AEM pages and microsites be assembled efficiently.
- Assisted in the design of a COVID-19 microsite that reported various business tools, better practices, and other resources to clients, users, and internal staff, assisting with remote sales tools, promotional sales, and payment systems.
- Designed the financial services authentication system and created the sign-in user-journey map. It included the design of different process screens.
- Researched and prepared a presentation for the corporation's data protection strategy (CCPA and GDPR tools.) Analyzed and created a competitive comparison to provide better tool recommendations.
- Designed an entire AEM site instance for the corporation's Integrity Design System that would use a nested AEM interface using the current components, templates, and patterns and nest them to have a live design system.
- Conducted UX research remote surveys and focus groups using user testing for different challenges. Gathered insights and provided a synthesis and analysis to guide and direct or suggest efforts.
Design Principal
Natural Bridges Ventures
- Crafted the company's brand identity standards guide, including colors, typography, language and tone, logos, and collateral materials.
- Designed four data sheets with illustrations and diagrams for business and marketing purposes.
- Conducted focus group interviews and facilitated a design thinking workshop at High Specialty Regional Hospital in Mexico City to analyze and assess the facility's operational strategy, challenges, and innovation opportunities.
- Guided UX design strategy meetings with a top global Hispanic social network that utilizes AI to build its human relationships through things people enjoy, hobbies, and emotions.
Associate Director of UX Design
North Dakota State University - IDeaspace
- Created, managed, and led the design studio lab where students, faculty, staff, and professionals collaborated through interdisciplinary teams.
- Sparked, developed, and nurtured a design thinking culture and methodology at North Dakota State University.
- Implemented a makerspace and hackerspace lab known as IDeaspace to help faculty, staff, and students incubate ideas and foster innovation.
- Created a bridge between the university's innovators and the community professionals to nurture innovation and exploration through interdisciplinary teams, including developers, engineers, content producers, visual designers, and business developers.
- Programmed a series of ExpressionEngine websites that gathered comments through Twitter and created a dynamic posting board.
- Produced a digital innovation channel on YouTube to motivate and inspire making ideas happen in the community and the region.
- Conducted UX research remote surveys and focus groups using Qualtrics for different challenges and topics. Gathered the insights and provided a synthesis and analysis to provide guidance and direct or suggest efforts.
Creative Director
North Dakota State University - Distance and Continuing Education + IDeaspace
- Designed a suite of apps to help students, faculty, staff, and visitors find offices and locations, keep track of their classes, provide a course listing with descriptions, enable a multi-relational system of QR tags, assist with emergency numbers.
- Directed, designed, and collaborated with the creation of a community app that found youth activities and events for children three years old through 18 years of age. In charge of product management, UX, and UI.
- Directed the creation of an innovation lab with multiple tools and networks among university and community professionals.
- Conducted UX research remote surveys and focus groups using Qualtrics for different challenges. Gathered insights and provided a synthesis and analysis to guide and direct or suggest efforts.
- Created and curated a YouTube channel to promote innovation and highly engage with those interested in making ideas happen with high technology skills mentoring and design thinking facilitation.
- Led Agile-based scrums, visual design, and engineering teams to support regional projects with global solutions.
- Strategized, directed, and supervised the design and development of responsive and adaptive websites to schedule project management, list events, and innovation lab, connect multiple databases to courses, classes, and the main department's website.
- Directed the photography and production of several video snippets for classes and courses conducted through distance and continuing education.
New Media Coordinator
North Dakota State University - Distance and Continuing Education
- Planned, designed, and developed the Department of Distance Education interconnected websites including web marketing and promotional site, course and instructor listing, podcasting sites, and the courses' microsite aggregator websites.
- Built several brands and marketing print and digital marketing campaigns for programs and courses that needed promoting. The design and creation included logotype and brand strategy, design systems, content tone, typography, color psychology.
- Strategized, planned, and produce an iTunes podcasting channel for distance education with several instructional courseware and formats such as audio, enhanced audio, and video.
- Streamlined and addressed an efficient workflow for course catalog creation to make it more engaging and provide easier-to-look indexes.
- Strategized and created a CMS that acted as a URL shortener for the more than 1,000 courses, interconnected to the course listings and repository or multi-relational classes, faculty, topic, and department.
- Assisted in creating data visualization (infographics) diagrams and illustrations for the department pitches and annual reports that helped in the income growth of the unit.
- Organized, launched, and managed the department's new media studio with sound-booth proofing and several cameras for video content creation.
- Conducted UX research to aid in creating the digital platforms combining user observation, focus groups, and user surveys to ensure engagement and analytical usage.
- Deployed a highly visual design thinking environment where all team members could see the status of any task or challenge in a digital or whiteboard setup easy to track.
- Formed creative and business alliances with organizations and other institutions to foster an innovative and collaborative environment.
Director of New Media
Publications Services of America, Inc
- Designed and developed the creative and engineering efforts of five CMS for aggregation and syndication of five main websites and 72 niche print publications markets across the U.S.
- Deployed a theme-based infrastructure and information architecture with Open X ads server and set the IAB standards for such frameworks throughout five different content syndicated websites.
- Strategized and set the information architecture for the integration and API creation of the five main magazines to have a specific theme and skin of each of the individual 72 markets and integrate the ads system and the taxonomy for more engagement.
- Designed and photographed content for print and digital publications and articles for home decoration and architecture, weddings, healthy living and fitness, lifestyle, and children publications with creative content.
- Directed, produced, and designed several DVDs and interactive digital content for collateral and promotional materials for our five main nationwide publications.
- Art directed and provided technical guidance to our team for digital HTML frameworks and CSS themes while dynamically getting data from image metadata parsing.
- Managed and directed an in-house agency team of digital media professionals (web designers, web developers, graphic designers, and copywriters).
- Conducted UX research for aiding in the creation of the digital platforms combining user observation, focus groups, and user surveys.
- Organized weekly milestone meetings with daily scrums to make sure our cadence and product development reached desired goals while addressing ticketed issues and bug tracking.
- Observed a design thinking methodology for new products or projects to gather insights and help our data-focused development.
Senior New Media Designer
North Dakota State University
- Designed and maintained a 10,000+ page website with a proprietary PHP CMS and Apache's preprocessors framework.
- Designed and developed web strategies and UI implementation based on best practices of human-focus design for the entire university.
- Created a 360º virtual campus map of the 82 campus buildings at the time.
- Planned and set strategies for future iterations of the ever-growing campus-wide website.
- Conducted focus groups and user surveys to gather data about website features and ideas, as well as assessed and analyzed the web analytics helped by Google Analytics and AW Stats.
- Designed a digital promotional campaign with video testimonials that won an AAF (American Advertising Federation) award for new media integration.
Senior New Media Designer
Velosel
- Set a proprietary Apache preprocessors CMS integrated with DHTML and PHP to manage the main website.
- Assisted in integrating a CSS framework with the SaaS by separating most of the programming from the visual design, CSS was just starting, and this had not been done yet.
- Created a marketing campaign that appeared in a couple of B2B magazines in Silicon Valley and gathered enough attention that resulted in client acquisition.
Education
Bachelor of Science Degree in Mass Communication
Tec de Monterrey - Monterrey, Mexico
Skills
Tools
Figma, Adobe Experience Design (XD), Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe InDesign, MURAL, Adobe Lightroom, Slack, Apache, Adobe CS6, Adobe InCopy, Microsoft PowerPoint, Adobe Creative Suite, Adobe Dreamweaver, Adobe Fireworks, Adobe Pagemaker, Adobe CC, Photoshop CC, InDesign CC, Photoshop 7, Illustrator CC, Sketch, InVision App, Final Cut Pro, Axure RP Pro, Miro, Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), Apple Motion, Xcode, Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe Flash, Qualtrics, GitHub, Adobe Captivate, Asana
Languages
HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP
Platforms
WordPress, YouTube, Web, Adobe Suite, Arduino, Craft CMS, Unix, Webflow
Industry Expertise
Education Technology (Edtech), Education, Marketing
Other
Web Design, Interaction Design (IxD), Adobe Creative Cloud, Art Direction, Creative Direction, Editorial Design, Layout Design, UX Design, Design Thinking, ExpressionEngine, SVG, UI Design, Design Systems, Presentations, Data Visualization, Responsive UI, Graphic Design, Front-end Design, Taxonomy, Innovation, PowerPoint Design, Web UX Design, Web Development Strategy, Product Owner, Project Management, Adaptive Design, Videos, Adobe Acrobat Pro, Bootstrap, Mobile UI, Mobile UX, Typography, Scalable Architecture, Information Design, Information Architecture (IA), Product Design, Branding, Presentation Design, Graphic Presentations, Wireframing, Collateral Design, Printing, Visual Design, Email Design, Marketing Design, Landing Page Design, Presentation Design, Responsive Web Design (RWD), Illustration, B2B, Dashboard Design, Design Sprints, User Interface (UI), Web App Design, Web App UI, High-fidelity Mockups, Photography, Vector Design, Leadership, User Experience (UX), Web App UX, Web UI, Web UI Design, Logo Design, Brand Design, Rebranding, User Flows, Paper Prototyping, Usability Testing, User Personas, Personas, Web UX, Marketplace Design, Brand Guidelines, Mobile Design, Mobile UI Design, Mobile UX Design, Card Sorting, Agile UX, Agile Sprints, Agile, Content Management Systems (CMS), User-centered Design (UCD), Visual Storytelling, Signage, Signage Design, Digital Marketing Design, User Journeys, User Onboarding, Image Manipulation, Print Marketing Design, Print Design, Journey Mapping, Websites, Digital Brand Identity, User Experience Strategy, Design Workshops, Ideation, Workshops, UX Workshops, UI Branding, Web Content, Design Leadership, Brand Identity, Team Mentoring, Edtech Design, Learning Management Systems (LMS), Instructional Design, Minimalism, Logotype, Journalism, Radio, Filmmaking, New Media, Advertising Design, Global Strategy, Electronic Sensors, Mobile Apps, Mobile App Design, Podcasting, Social Media, Metadata, Color Theory, Color Science, Color Grading, Ad Servers, Ads, CodeKit, Scalable Application, Databases, eCommerce UX, eCommerce UI, SaaS Design, Prototyping, User Research, Motion Graphics, eCommerce, Animated Prototypes, Mobile Prototypes, User Interviews, UX Research, Quantitative Research, Spatial Design, Motion Design, Environmental Graphics, Gallery, Booth Design, Digital Marketing Strategy, Packaging, Product Packaging, Package Design, Gamification, App Design, Accessibility, E-learning, Training, TV Broadcasting, Digital Signage, Design Strategy
Experience
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