Justin DeBlois

Visual Designer / UX Advocate

I’m a life-long learner. Sounds cliché doesn’t it? That doesn’t make it any less true!

For the last three years I’ve been working as a designer at Von Sands Creative which is a small studio whose clients are mostly medium to large cosmetic brands. Since reading the book The Lean Startup by Eric Ries, I’ve made my mantra build, measure, and learn and have applied it to my visual and UX design process!

Please enjoy my portfolio which has work that exemplifies my new mantra.

I Build…

Simple and nuanced solutions don’t just happen; they are made by the creation of numerous (and I mean numerous) ideas.

The first step in building is coming up with the ideas in the first place. Personally I am a fan of mind maps and sticky notes but I am always trying to find new ways to boost productivity when it comes to brainstorming.

Sketching comes next, always with pencils (pens freak me out). 

Finally, I almost always start with a quick paper prototype and move on to the higher fidelity ones once testing has been conducted and hypotheses have been examined through research.

I Measure…

Creating designs that are testable is the most important part of my process. Metrics are the cornerstone of making better design decisions especially in the field of user experience design, so picking the right metrics is paramount. 

I Learn…

What do I do with all that data and feedback? I make it work for me. Learning from the measuring phase is often the most exciting and worthwhile phase because it informs me what needs to happen next. Most of the time I make iterations in this phase – keep what is working and remove what isn’t.

When the learning phase feeds back into the building phase, great design occurs and these three phases become cyclical in practice.

Clients

It has been an absolute pleasure to have worked and continue to work with these clients.