Matt Gillespie
Verified Expert in Design
Designer
Asheville, NC, United States
Toptal member since May 29, 2019
Matt is an experienced, focused, and enthusiastic designer with a knack for finding impactful, effective, and elegant solutions to complex problems. His career spans a dozen years crafting user-centric strategies to design and build digital experiences for startups, Fortune 500 companies, and advertising agencies. Matt believes design is about finding the simplest solution to a complex problem in the most effective, efficient, and delightful way. In the end, the user is his priority.
Portfolio
Work Experience
Senior Designer
Radformation
- Designed and built the company website in a full redesign, focused on product promotion and the company's thought leadership.
- Built a design system to unify user experience across multiple products across native Microsoft and browser-based environments.
- Led a marketing initiative to redesign the company's web presence.
- Created trade show booth designs and collateral, landing pages, and emails for international industry trade events.
- Volunteered to learn multiple new languages to bug fix, design, and then develop native Microsoft products in XAML, WPF, and CS.
- Built a design team to handle the growing needs of the company's seven-fold growth and deployed new processes to handle the increased workload between eight different product teams and the marketing, sales, support, and success teams.
Interaction Designer
IBM - Cloud
- Introduced a new visual language to IBM Cloud, working with multiple stakeholders across IBM Watson, cloud, and design teams.
- Created a prototyping team within IBM Cloud to lead user testing, user journey mapping, and delivering interactive prototypes.
- Founded the IBM Design Guild to cultivate a unified approach to design across the IBM Cloud marketing and product design teams.
- Contributed to the overall IBM Cloud brand with submissions to the standards team in an effort to unify the IBM Cloud web UI.
Front-end Designer
Compose
- Designed and developed the company website all in HTML and CSS, learning how to work in a fast-paced development environment.
- Created a new brand for Compose, including a new brand expression, redefined color palette, a modern brand voice and visual style.
- Designed, built, and deployed the highly successful blog of Compose.com, the largest contributor of traffic to the company website.
- Crafted digital advertising solutions, including banner ads, landing pages, email campaigns, and apparel designs.
Visual Designer
Intuit - TurboTax
- Designed campaign pages for the 2016 tax season, including multiple new landing pages, signup flows, and educational pages.
- Created concepts and mockups for the new TurboTax.com to set the tone for the year's messaging and marketing strategy.
- Worked with the front-end design team to add interactive web apps to TurboTax's growing suite of informative tax education tools.
- Hosted in-person and video-based user research sessions and testing groups for newly created landing pages and campaigns.
- Devised an interactive prototyping solution for dynamic content testing of new motion and animation styles for TurboTax online tools.
Product Designer
OneRoof Energy
- Crafted a vision for a 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 SunOps.com.
- Developed front-end code to implement a responsive CSS framework to deliver a unified, device-agnostic experience.
- Managed user research while leading a working partnership with a local digital analytics shop to gather user metrics and data.
- Introduced a design-centric team culture, moving away from necessity-driven development to a user-driven design by introducing user research and experience-focused and modern design practices.
Interaction Designer
Modea
- Art directed and designed an overhaul of Duke Medicine's website, building a brand direction, style guide, and design standards.
- Worked with Duke successfully, and the entire company pivoted to a healthcare industry focus following the project.
- Created experience and interaction designs for an industry-leading simulator for mobile devices for Verizon Wireless.
- Worked closely with a small team at Chiquita to conceive, wire-frame, and design a Facebook-based coupon promotion game.
- Delivered user flows and wireframes for Moveline, a web-based moving application to try to disrupt an antiquated industry.
- Contributed to and won multiple campaign pitches and RFPs for national and international brands' digital advertising initiatives.
Education
Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in Visual Communication Design
Virginia Tech - Blacksburg, VA, USA
Skills
Tools
Sketch, Figma, Adobe Photoshop, UXPin, Adobe Illustrator, InVision App, Affinity Photo, Adobe, Affinity Designer, InVision, Adobe After Effects, Balsamiq, Axure RP Pro, OmniGraffle
Industry Expertise
Marketing, Technology, Healthcare, Health
Languages
HTML, CSS, JavaScript, CSS3
Platforms
iOS, Adobe Suite, Drupal, Axure, Web, Drupal 7
Other
Web Design, Responsive, UI Design, Web UX, Product Design, Marketing Design, Prototyping, User Roles, Mobile UX, UX Flows, Mood Boards, Sitemaps, Sass, Leadership, User Flows, DSLR, Animation, Illustration, iOS UX Design, Graphics, Information Architecture (IA), Design, UI Style Guides, Rebranding, Writing & Editing, Inbound Marketing Plan, User Experience (UX), Design Systems, Content Strategy, Interaction Design (IxD), Responsive Design, Design Strategy, Branding, Open Source, Front-end Design, Databases, Wireframing, User Journey Maps, Touch Interactions, Tablet UI, Tablet UX, User Interviews, User Research, Product Marketing, UX Design, Taxation, Kids & Families, App Design, Wireframe to Product, Freelancing, Videos, Web Search, Hospitals, Patient Services, Mobile App Design, Mobile UI Design, Performance Analysis, Trucking, Fleet Management, Record Keeping, Mobile UX Design, User Testing, Renewable Energy, Solar PV Design, Solar, Paper Prototyping, Bootstrap, Sales, Sales Enablement, Art, Visual Design
Experience
- Web Design - 14 years
- UI Design - 14 years
- Web UX - 10 years
- Marketing Design - 9 years
- Product Design - 8 years
- Prototyping - 8 years
- Figma - 7 years
- Mobile UX - 5 years
Tools
- Figma
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