Designer & Illustrator. 🎨

Jan 89’ - Present

Heya, Im Steven! 👋 Nice to virtually meet ya. I use design to ease visual communication for products and businesses while helping build engaged userbases and meaningful communities.

Collaborate, build, & grow. 🙏🏻

Building audiences, designing products, and engaging communities.

BRD

August 2018 - November 2019

Our wonderful little marketing team drove growth for the 100% remote company. We broke multiple records for revenue, MAU, TVL, and other growth-driven KPIs using strategy, data analysis, and good design implementation.

Freelance

January 2012 - Present

I'm a multidisciplinary designer with years of freelance experience, an understanding of HTML, CSS, some JavaScript, UI design, UX research, Marketing, ASO and SEO.

Life West

August 2014 - August 2018

I had the opportunity to help build the Marketing & Creative Team at Life West, a graduate institution in Hayward, CA. Our team drove growth for the school and was responsible for prospective student acquisition.

Happy humans. 🙃

I love helping people realize their ideas into reality.

Nadia Fakhoury

I appreciated his insight and the innovation that he provided at every stage, as well as the promptness in his work. He was always open to feedback, and he made sure I was completely satisfied.

Erica Tahan

Steve's capability to juggle multiple projects was unlike anything I've seen from a designer – it made a dramatic difference in the productivity level of our team.

Riki Newton

What I value and admire most about working with Steve is his willingness to take feedback. No one is harder on Steve than Steve, and yet because of this introspective quality, he’s acutely aware of his strengths and weaknesses and never recoils when confronted with either.

diamond

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BRD

Marketing Manager & Designer

August 18’ - November 19'

What I've Learned

What a great opportunity it was to be apart of the marketing team over at BRD. Bitcoin, Ethereum, and crypto in general is something I'm really interested in, so being apart of helping build one of the most prolific companies in the space was a great growing experience.

I started on a contract as a designer creating marketing assets like illustrations, icons, ads, video animations, etc. From there they hired me into a managerial growth position handling user acquisition and design management for marketing.

In my time there, I helped launch multiple growth and revenue-driven campaigns that broke records month after month. Helping build partner volume and growing user engagement. Our small but nimble team grew the global userbase from 1M to 2.5M users and increased monthly active users by 60%.

Designer, illustrator, wearer of all hats. 🎩

I was 1 of 3 designers at the company and handled a majority of the consumer-facing marketing assets. The marketing team was in charge of building the brand and keeping it alive.

That's what we did. 🙂

I ❤️ design tools and I'm well-versed in many. Figma, Sketch, Adobe's suite, Blender, etc; Im also quick to learn and familiarize myself with something new.

Quality is important to me. 🙏🏻

In addition to visuals, I managed ad spend and strategy for user acquisition, utilizing data to find where the cost-effective inventory was for our marketing initiatives to thrive in what ultimately was a bearish market environment.

Our team created many very successful marketing campaigns to help drive top of the funnel growth as well as quality engagement throughout the funnel breaking records month after month. 📈

Building engaged userbases is hard. 🤐

Bitcoin and Defi are still in its infancy and the wallet space specifically is especially saturated. At BRD we needed to get innovative in how we approached and found new customers.

Using market data and understanding who our users were was our edge in a saturated market. I was able to figure out a global strategy to increase our userbase at an efficient pace and at a low cost to us.

BRD's userbase grew 150% from 1 million users to 2.5 million users through the help of various campaigns, ad vendors, special promotions, and other UA strategies.

What I valued most at BRD was the opportunity the company gave me, the truly meaningful work I did there, and the wonderful people I had the great pleasure of learning from every day.

Freelance

Designer - Developer - Learner

January 12’ - Present

What I've Learned

The learning truly never stops. My fascination with web & mobile technologies, building businesses, and the tech industry, in general, have shaped my experiences in life. I try to submerge myself in the space as much as I can, in order to create and build the future I want to see for myself.

Working as a freelancer has allowed me to take on projects to help grow my design and developer chops building upon my knowledge of programming languages such as HTML, CSS, PHP, and Javascript. I love helping people realize their dreams visually.

Freelancing has also allowed me to organize and optimize my focus; building on the foundation of what makes a good designer, developer, collaborator, and team member; Communication and organization.

Nadia Fakhoury

I appreciated his insight and the innovation that he provided at every stage, as well as the promptness in his work. He was always open to feedback, and he made sure I was completely satisfied.

Livingston Buchanan

Steven helped me put my design together and continued to support me for years on updates. Before this website we didnt have anything at all; Steven legit brought B&N to a new level.

television

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diamond

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As a designer I believe the content drives the design, and research drives the decisions. A clean design with a user-centric approach can really grab the attention of your customers and can help drive them to meet your needs as well as theirs.

As a developer I strive for semantic and efficient code. I don’t know everything, but what I do know is an optimized experience can make or break your product. I use best practices to build your product so it doesn't break on you, but works for you.

As a creator I implement what I've seen and learned through my experiences into creating something that drives engagement and business for your product or brand.

Untapped Brews was a startup I co-founded that helped local breweries reach a wider audience through an online retail experience.

We ran untapped brews for about 2 years hosting local craft beer events and selling local beers nationally. I handled everything from the shipping logistics, product packaging and marketing, website sales, marketing, design, branding, business logistics, and every other little thing that comes along with starting a small business.

A rewarding experience, as well as a humbling one. Building a startup is hard and the company ultimately failed in the end but being able to learn and grow as a business owner, marketer, and designer is something always be grateful for.

The Wealthy Healthy is the podcast and blog dedicated to inspiring better mental, physical, and financial health. It exists for the primary purpose of getting you fired up to make improvements in your life.

It started as an idea to share useful content and possibly speak with interesting individuals from all backgrounds and has grown to 50+ episodes, 25+ interviews, 8,500+ downloads, with a listening audience in 20 countries and 28 states.

I work on The Wealthy Healthy and handle the website development and design, along with the audio engineering for the show. Check us out @ The Wealthy Healthy!

I really do just ❤️ to create; It's where I find my flow🧘. It allows me to constantly be working on myself as a human helping build my skills creatively & professionally.

Life West

Web Design & Development

August 14’ - August 18'

What I've Learned

I had the opportunity to join and help build the Marketing & Creative Team at Life West. The team drives the conversation around the institution and the chiropractic profession to prospective students, alumni, and the public eye.

I worked closely with our digital marketer managing SEO optimization, campaign landing pages, and maintenance for our website.

Working at Life West has allowed me to expand my knowledge of HTML, CSS, PHP, and Javascript as well as gain a more well rounded understanding of SEO, digital marketing, and best practices for a good user experience.

The number 1 hurdle for a prospective student is accessable information when inquiring about an institution. A simple redesign of our inquiry form increased our leads online by 50% per month.

The problem was simple, the inquiry form was cluttered and hard to fill out. It was actually preventing students from inquiring at all.

The solution for us was to re-asses and re-design the form with more of a simple, user-centric approach.

Our digital marketer provided me with the information we required in the form. I build out and designed the prototype to spec, as well as conducted user tests with our director of enrollment, multiple admissions reps, and two current students who underwent the previous process before the change.

My Take Away is that sometimes, a simple change can make a big difference to the performance and experience of the product.

Looking at what you need to improve upon before adding new features or services might be the better option. Testing is important, in the end, good feedback was the key to the success of this form. The user testing, albeit minuscule, really helped decide what functionality was needed and not needed in the final iteration.

Redesigning an event landing page led to a 30% increase in sign-ups for future events & a more manageable back end environment for event managers.

The problem was the numbers for our quarterly prospective student outreach event the event was slowly declining as the program aged. The landing page was outdated and in need of a new design and the back end systems/processes needed updating.

We took this opportunity to redesign the landing page with the prospective and the event manager in mind.

They allowed me to completely rethink the approach we had visually and let me try out a lot of new technologies to help the build. We went through multiple iterations with input from project stakeholders and managers of the event and ended with this final iteration.

Redesigns and automation are your friends! We're often afraid to try something new because of time consumption or fear of new systems, but it can really help when it’s actually needed.

A simple refresh to pages on a website can do wonders for the experience of the user.

The Problem: Full website redesigns are costly, especially for an institution with a lot of content. Resources are scarce and time is better spent on other campaigns.

The Solution: A more manageable refresh of the website was done to better portray content on the site allowing current users to have a better experience browsing.

The Process: I went through the main website and updated typographic styles and applied some UI/UX best practices in order to give the same website a refreshed feel.

My Take Away: You dont always need to redo everything, in fact, sometimes resources are better spent elsewhere on more urgent projects.

Life West hosts an annual industry leading seminar dubbed The WAVE. I worked on a refresh of our 2017 design and attempted to make the content pop more without changing too much from our 2017 theme. Similar to our.EDU website, a subtle change made all the difference.

In these situations, time and budgets are the constraints. Tools like WordPress are amazing ways to cut costs and keep development time to a minimum. While WordPress is very a versatile CMS, themes, and functionality within those themes can show up lacking to the needs of an organization using them, as it did for us. This leads to custom-developed pages, plugins, and functionality within languages such as HTML, CSS, PHP, and javascript.

For 2017 the institution required a countdown feature on all pages, as well as other custom features on internal pages such as the speaker bio’s and the speaker grid page, These features and custom code, were able to be brought into 2018 as well cutting the cost of development. The aim of the redesign was to give our users a more fluid online experience and highlight the good content the site had to offer.

This in combination with great online marketing helped us achieve a record number of attendees. Roughly 2,000+ doctors, students and alumni, and prospective students attended the WAVE in 2017.