Matt is available for hire
Hire MattMatt Gillespie
Verified Expert in Design
Designer
Location
Asheville, NC, United States
Toptal Member Since
May 29, 2019
Matt is a designer with a decade of experience crafting user-centric strategies to design and build digital experiences for startups, Fortune 500 companies, advertising agencies, and individual clients. He's guided user research sessions, conducted user interviews, led marketing campaigns, built style guides, and published many websites and mobile apps.
Portfolio
Work Experience
Senior Designer
2019 - PRESENT
Radformation
- Led all facets of design for a software startup in the radiation oncology space.
- Tasked with designing and building multiple user interfaces for a growing product application offering.
- Led a marketing initiative to redesign the company's web presence.
Technologies: JavaScript, CSS, HTML, InVision, Figma, Adobe Suite
Interaction Designer
2016 - 2019
IBM - Cloud
- Led a high-fidelity prototyping initiative with a team of remote developers for the IBM Cloud marketing team, focusing on user education and customer conversion.
- Reached across to the product design and development teams to create a clear line of communication between them and the marketing design teams, driving consistency in tone, voice, and visual design to create a more unified and complete user journey from user adoption to user retention and advocacy.
- Contributed to and applied an updated, clean, and bold design system to the existing IBM Cloud marketing website in conjunction with other divisions within IBM.
- Drove innovation in design strategy and design thinking within the content-centric inbound marketing department, focusing on user retention and interactive educational elements presented within the IBM Cloud website.
- Removed the blockade of misunderstanding between marketing design and development within IBM Cloud by acting as a liaison between the two parties, unifying the work stream and overcoming inefficiencies.
Technologies: Drupal, CSS, HTML, Sketch, UXPin, Adobe Suite, InVision
Front-end Designer
2015 - 2018
Compose
- Initiated a redesign of the marketing site by creating a new style guide for the updated branding and marketing style of Compose.
- Designed and coded the completely revamped marketing site to reflect growth from a single service SAAS offering to a multi-pronged SAAS platform.
- Reworked the messaging around our product to more closely represent the current services of Compose, focusing on action.
- Designed, tested, and released the highly successful blog offshoot of Compose.com, the single biggest contributor of traffic to the site.
- Crafted digital advertising solutions, including banner ads, landing pages, email campaigns, and apparel designs.
Technologies: Affinity Designer, Sketch, Adobe Suite, Sass, HTML
Visual Designer
2015 - 2015
Intuit - TurboTax
- Created a new version of their campaign pages for the 2016 tax season, which included multiple new landing pages, signup flows, and educational pages.
- Helped in the early stages of creating an entirely new home page for TurboTax.com to set the tone for the tax year's messaging and marketing strategy.
- Worked with the front-end design team to add highly interactive and helpful web apps to TurboTax's growing list of informative tax education tools.
- Held in-person and video-hosted user research sessions and testing groups for newly created landing pages and campaigns.
- Devised an interactive prototyping solution for dynamic content testing with motion and animation included.
Technologies: Adobe After Effects, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop
Product Designer
2013 - 2015
OneRoof Energy
- Created a responsive web application, SunOpps.com, to help homeowners design and finance their system without feeling the pressure of the traditional sales process.
- Crafted a vision for 2.0 version of the industry-changing web application with an agile/scrum structure in a startup environment.
- Owned all aspects of UX and UI design, branding, messaging, and visual design in the initial MVP of the web app. Started coding as a front-end developer whilst implementing a responsive CSS framework to deliver a unified, device-agnostic experience.
- Managed user research and testing while leading a working partnership with a local digital media and analytics shop in an effort to gather more comprehensive user metrics and usage data.
- Introducing a design-centric team culture, moving away from necessity-driven development to a user-driven design by introducing user research, experience-focused and modern design practices.
Technologies: Balsamiq, Axure, CSS, HTML, Adobe Suite
Interaction Designer
2010 - 2013
Modea
- Crafted multiple advertisements and advertising campaigns for the agency, including everything from initial sketches and image adjustments to copywriting and proofing.
- Designed beautiful, effective, results-driven web products for brands like Chiquita, Verizon Wireless, HTC, Lennox Tools, and Duke Medicine, among others.
- Art directed, designed, and crafted a modern, responsive experience for a complete overhaul of the flagship digital property of one of the nation’s leading healthcare providers, Duke Medicine. I set the initial brand refresh direction, devised a style guide, and set interaction design standards.
- Helped created the experience and interaction designs for an industry-leading, step-by-step how-to simulator for mobile devices, on mobile devices for Verizon Wireless.
- Worked closely with a small team at Chiquita, but I essentially conceived, wire-framed, and designed a Facebook-based flash game from end-to-end.
- Helped deliver user flows, content flows, and wireframes to an ongoing project for Moveline. I applied an existing style guide to my designs in an effort to create an industry-changing application.
Technologies: Adobe Suite
Education
2006 - 2010
Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in Visual Communication Design
Virginia Tech - Blacksburg, VA, USA