
Eric Dunne
Verified Expert in Marketing
Marketing Expert
Columbus, OH, United States
Toptal member since October 29, 2024
Eric is a marketing expert who builds brands, guidelines that stick, design systems that unify and optimize output, and processes and teams that create cohesive experiences—impacting the head, heart, and wallet. As an award-winning designer and creative director, Eric strives to create campaigns that fuel growth and delight customers.
Project Highlights
Expertise
- Adobe Creative Cloud
- Brand Guidelines
- Brand Strategy
- Branding
- Creative Direction
- Creative Strategy
- Cross-functional Collaboration
- Mentorship
Work Experience
Brand & Creative Director
Independent
- Advised on brand strategy, creative strategy, and user experience.
- Developed clients' brand identity, messaging, positioning, and differentiation.
- Created design systems and brand guidelines for product and marketing.
Brand & Creative Director
Mantium
- Developed the brand identity, messaging, positioning, and differentiation to set up Mantium as the fastest way to prepare data for AI applications.
- Created design systems for product and marketing design, ensuring a cohesive brand experience.
- Built a library of self-service assets and templates to empower compliance.
- Mentored, guided, and championed an international team of designers, evangelists, and marketers to produce campaigns and creatives that inspired current and potential users.
Executive Creative Director
DataRobot
- Set the creative vision, strategy, innovation, and direction.
- Maintained brand standards across the company, including vendors and partners.
- Built a library of self-service assets and templates for use across the enterprise.
- Continued all duties from my previous role as the brand and creative director.
Brand & Creative Director
DataRobot
- Led and mentored remote international brand and creative teams of up to 28 people, driving graphic and web design, video, content, copy, web development, and optimization.
- Coordinated creative direction between teams to create and maintain a consistent, cohesive brand experience.
- Collaborated cross-functionally with sales, marketing, product, engineering, and corporate communication teams, ensuring all creatives were brand-compliant.
- Created brand guidelines and design specifications to empower internal and external teams to develop key brand elements while remaining within the brand guidelines.
- Managed resource allocation, budget, and timelines to ensure assets were on brand and delivered on time and within budget.
VP of Marketing
Nexosis (acquired by DataRobot)
- Built and led the marketing team from scratch, developing and executing brand and marketing strategies that resulted in the company's acquisition.
- Increased brand recognition and engagement by leading strategic work, including competitor analysis, marketing communication plans, event marketing, content marketing, and social media.
- Led UX and design work, aligning the product, website, and other digital assets with brand guidelines and optimizing them for the best user experience.
UX Design Manager
Cardinal Health
- Oversaw and directed the user experience of the eCommerce digital marketing department for the $91 billion pharmaceutical ordering platform.
- Provided UX and UI direction for the iOS and Android versions of the eCommerce platform, achieving successful launch and quick adoption.
- Contributed to a $120 million revenue increase through effective creative direction and campaign strategies.
- Coordinated UI and UX enhancements between stakeholders and technical and business teams.
- Partnered with 25 internal business units, maintaining a Forrester customer experience index of 90%.
Senior Creative Strategist
Involve
- Developed and maintained design standards for agency and clients' brands.
- Oversaw the creative strategy and process for each portfolio brand.
- Directed photoshoots and designed the BOSU fitness packaging update.
Associate Creative Director
ELEVATEthinking
- Led a team of art directors, designers, and copywriters, including creative strategy, execution, process, and review.
- Oversaw brand development and implementation and campaign strategy, conception, and execution, ensuring consistent brand messaging.
- Handled national integrated campaigns for various clients across industries.
Creative Director
Circone + Associates
- Led creatives, including strategy, creation, and execution of branded elements, applications, print advertising, collateral, radio, broadcast, video editing and production, and website design and development.
- Developed and managed brand standards and compliance.
- Created the brand, including its purpose, position, tone, differentiation, and messaging.
Project History
Via Scientific Website
https://esdunne.myportfolio.com/via-scientific-websiteLed the brand strategy, creative strategy and direction, copy, web design, and web development.
BUSINESS NEED
Via Scientific wanted to inject some humanity and emotion into the messaging around their highly technical and scientific platform.
CHALLENGE
The new website needed to appeal to both the scientific community and decision-makers, who are often different personas.
OUTCOME
We applied the updated messaging, more approachable, refreshed brand, and new illustration style to a brand-new website.
Mantium Secure Chat
https://esdunne.myportfolio.com/mantium-chatGuided the brand and creative strategy while ensuring consistency, UX excellence, and usability.
CHALLENGE
As with any bleeding-edge technology, the largest challenge was solving problems that had never been solved. How do you enable row-level permissions so the chat agent only shares with the right people? How do you guide the user through connecting their data and preparing them for AI? How do you chain data transformations together so users can see what's changing at each stage?
OUTCOME
Sadly, when we had the product ready for a closed beta, OpenAI announced a new ChatGPT feature that was largely what we had built. This was the day that Mantium died.
Mantium Design System
https://esdunne.myportfolio.com/mantium-design-systemServed as the creative director and pushed for consistency and usability by leveraging design patterns.
BUSINESS NEED
Mantium moved at the speed of AI to stay on the bleeding-edge of technology and keep pace with the engineering team.
CHALLENGE
The biggest challenge was keeping pace with engineering and the shiny object syndrome that plagues new technology.
OUTCOME
The design system enabled the design and development teams to work simultaneously and allowed for quick turnaround on concepts and easy implementation for the engineering team. By using the design system and developer components, engineering could build using pre-established design patterns, saving time, while the design team created a more finessed product.
Mantium Website
https://esdunne.myportfolio.com/mantium-websiteLed the website's design and development from vision to implementation.
BUSINESS NEED
Mantium needed a website to represent its product and be updated quickly and efficiently to accommodate the many pivots. This website covers the platform's features, a blog to communicate their thought leadership, a resource center, and a culture page for recruitment.
OUTCOME
Through its many iterations, the Mantium website was built on reusable template blocks, allowing drag-and-drop page building and predefined parameters to keep it flexible, consistent, and mobile-friendly.
DataRobot Brand Guidelines
https://esdunne.myportfolio.com/datarobot-brand-guidelinesAnalyzed current designs for patterns and gaps and standardized the brand by writing guidelines, creating templates, and leading the creative execution.
DataRobot, while a global brand, lacked brand guidelines for the design team to reference. As a result, every piece of collateral had its own feel, depending on the assigned designer.
OUTCOME
After carefully reviewing all current collateral, web, and video assets, I established cohesive and flexible brand guidelines so designers, vendors, and internal teams could all create unified assets for DataRobot.
DataRobot Creative Samples
https://esdunne.myportfolio.com/datarobot-creative-samplesLed the creative strategy, marketing design, web design, web development, content, and video teams to create a cohesive brand experience across all touchpoints.
BUSINESS NEED
DataRobot needed a single brand experience across its multitude of channels. My task was to create brand guidelines and standardize the various design elements and patterns.
CHALLENGE
The biggest challenge was how much DataRobot employees loved their brand and doing whatever they wanted with it—the brand guidelines needed to be clear yet flexible to keep this enthusiasm while minimizing the chaos.
OUTCOME
Over six months, I reviewed and evaluated all brand touchpoints. The brand refresh involved consolidating and unifying the best of what was already in use while optimizing the experience and establishing and implementing clear guidelines across the company. The final deliverables included brand guidelines, templates, and asset libraries.
Nexosis Branding & UX
https://esdunne.myportfolio.com/nexosis-branding-uxLed the marketing department, providing brand, marketing, and creative strategy and direction. Contributed hands-on to graphic design, product design, web design and development, and UX design.
BUSINESS NEED
Nexosis needed a cohesive brand that tied its capabilities and offerings to its target user base: developers.
CHALLENGE
The largest problem with the early AI space was that it could do so much that it was difficult for the user to figure out what exactly to do with it.
OUTCOME
By showing code simplicity, use cases, dashboards, and a UI interface, developers started brainstorming what they could do with a lower load and time to proof-of-concept. The rest of Nexosis' branding and marketing was positioned to help get developers from their first concept to the start of the iteration cycle.
Education
Bachelor's Degree in Journalism
Milligan College - Johnson City, TN, USA
Skills
Core
Branding, Brand Strategy, Copywriting, Campaign Strategy, Ad Campaigns, Marketing Strategy, Content Marketing
Platforms & Tools
Adobe Photoshop, Adobe InDesign, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Premiere, Adobe Creative Suite
Other
Brand Design, Creative Strategy, Creative Direction, Mentorship, Brand Guidelines, Art Direction, Brand Development, Adobe Creative Cloud, Cross-functional Collaboration, User Interface (UI), UX Design, Design Systems, Storytelling, Stakeholder Management, Team Leadership, B2B Marketing, Web Design, WordPress, UI Design, Figma, Web Development, Product Design, Graphic Design, Package Design, Creative Briefs, Copy Editing, Brand Positioning, Advertising, Video Editing, Messaging, Notion, Slack, Web App UI, Journalism
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