I got started in web design by chance. Working for New Riders publishing, I had the opportunity to work on many instrumental web design titles, from Hillman Curtis’ Flash Web Design to Jakob Nielsen’s Designing Web Usability. After Flash Web Design was published, Hillman Curtis invited me to spend a week in his New York studio, where I designed business cards for Hillman’s company, and learned about their process. It was spending time with Hillman Curtis that inspired my love for web design.
I taught myself Flash and HTML, from my massive library of New Riders books that I’d worked on, and I moved to Los Angeles in 2001. I put an ad on Craigslist, offering to design sites for free, to build a portfolio. After a day, I took the ad down, due to overwhelming response. It was a great method of networking, though, and in no time, people were paying me to build sites for them.
In 2005, I moved from print to web, designing user interfaces for companies like Pacificare, Yesmail, Cloudmanic Labs, and Nonfat Media, where I spent the three years as the sole UX/UI designer for two large-scale web applications, Actors Access and Breakdown Express, sites that receive over one million hits per day.
For the last four years, I was the Senior UX/UI Designer for Agfa’s Eversify project. There, I led every aspect of the project’s UX and design. From meeting with stakeholders to mapping user flows, brainstorming, wireframing in Axure, and prototyping, I wore many hats.
I’ve also served as a Visual Designer at various advertising agencies, the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising, Guess? clothing, Encore Software, and Frederick’s of Hollywood, all in a freelance capacity. I spent two years at Connexus Corporation, an online marketing company, designing micro-sites, landing pages, email campaigns, and ad banners for brands like Vonage, DirecTV, Blockbuster, PBS, and many more.
I have formal training in Human-Computer Interaction, having completed the studio track of the Human-Computer Interaction course offered through Coursera/Stanford University.
I am looking for a position that values UX, and offers continued growth and learning opportunities. I watch Lynda.com training videos as if they were in my Netflix queue!
In my free time, I love to cook (I just got a sous vide cooker!). I love to travel (I have food tips for you for Lisbon, Barcelona, several other European cities, and all over the American south). I maintain a saltwater reef aquarium with various corals and one fish who is around four years old. I’m also an avid photographer. I’ve worked on a photo a day project for the past eight years. I also volunteer as a mentor for the Pablove Foundation, where we work with children living with cancer to instill a love of photography.
If you’d like to discuss my skills and qualifications, you can contact me at steve@stevegifford.com.