Jason Ross, Sr. Web Designer, Creative Leader

Email: jason@designspouse.com

Phone: (847) 801-9004

LinkedIn:LinkedIn.com/in/JasonARoss - See Recommendations on LinkedIn

Location: Greater Chicago Area

Website: DesignSpouse.com

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Director, Enterprise Software Engineering with Yes Merketing (Infogroup)

Reported to the VP of Engineering. Managed a variety of software engineering roles while actively working on projects. This includes successful design, development and deployment of two enterprise applications. Effective management of the QA team, UI engineering team, SDET team and mentored various API engineers in an agile environment. Directed and executed various UX/UI efforts for both applications. Additionally, I was active with release management of our pre-prod and production releases.

• Set quality standards and requirements for the SDET team for front and back end testing to build robust, informative and dependable test suites for regression tests including workflow and end-to-end tests.
• Mentored QA team and led efforts to provide the organization with multi-team (product, qa, engineering, support) alignment and expectations resulting in quality releases with zero rollbacks, minor patch forwards.
• Spearheaded efforts and defined release requirements to successfully reduce application bug count with every production release.
• Create, digest and comprehend business requirements to create user stories for our customer data platform.
• Delivered global UX/UI for the customer data platform that utilizes current trends and is easy to use.
• Release management: Asset collection, deployment, manifest creation, branch and release management via git flow.
• Conducted performance reviews for all direct reports and provide constant feedback throughout the year.
• Oversaw implementation of code standards and outlined branching procedures across all teams.
• Managed offshore and recruiting relationships. Created job descriptions to align with organizational needs, hire and implement onboarding guidelines for engineers.
• Actively evaluated applications for completeness and quality.

Director, Web & Application Development with Sears Holdings

Partner with all stakeholders (PMs, UX, Design, POs, Program Managers, Infrastructure) to deliver internal and in-store applications to deliver a WOW member experience. The project with the most gratification was our Endless Aisle in-store application catering to stores with smaller footprints to provide the entire sears catalog at the customer’s finger tips.

Manager, Web Development with Sears Holdings

Led a team of 22 front and back-end engineers working on as many as 5 enterprise applications at a time across multiple business units (BU). Met regularly with all BU stakeholders through the development lifecycle.

• Led the charge in presenting responsive design rewrite proposal for Sears, Kmart and Shop Your Way (3 server-side applications) gift registries to a single client-side application.
• Hands on design, UX direction and development on projects: Gift Registry, Buy Online Pick Up in Store, Sears.com and ShopSears.
• Implemented code standards and code review processes for cross team and application consistency.
• Reviewed business requests for development to assess scope, resource allocation and deliverables.

Sr. Web Developer with Sears Holdings

Championed effort to lead and guide the email design and development team to convert all marketing emails to mobile optimized designs, with the purpose to enhance mobile presence and click-through. My contributions and leadership resulted in positive performance reviews and professional growth.

• Built all first gen responsive email templates for Sears, Kmart, Lands’ End and Shop Your Way.
• Led team trainings and brought entire team (design/dev) up to speed on responsive email design and coding concepts and techniques.
• Worked closely with UX and graphic designers to implement stakeholder approved application designs.

Creative Lead with MediaSpan

A hands on, detailed creative leader, successfully delivered client needs on time with quality.

• Led creative sessions and drove art direction for client deliverables.
• Managed and lead design team and contract resources.

Sr. Web Designer with MediaSpan

Designed, developed and provided all production QA for client deliverables. Worked tightly with asp.net developers to build an in-house website template builder. This effort included UX for the user portal, all the modular code for all website components and multiple frameworks for client selection. The website builder reduced development time 60-80%.

• Train and mentor new and team members and existing when industry standards changed. Led all cross department design training sessions.
• Accurately define timelines and level of effort for both large and small scope clients proposals.

Web Designer with MediaSpan

Met with clients, conceptualized, designed and developed hundreds of websites, games and emails for major radio clients. Designed print materials for marketing purposes and trade shows.

MediaSpan: Results and Achievements

• Agilesite Level 2 Builder
  

  Established extensive DIV/CSS-based HTML module and framework templates to ensure all clients using this platform receive the best and most current website using the standards set by the W3C all while ensuring the sites were cross browser compatible. This served as an internal tool to limit development time to 4 hours and cut design time by 40%.

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• Agilesite Level 1 Branding Wizard
  

  Modified and built upon existing Agilesite HTML framework to create Level 1 Agilesite and OSA branding wizard interface. This product allows clients to build and brand their own entry-level website online with minimal knowledge or time investment.

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• Fan Frenzy
  

  Established extensive DIV/CSS-based HTML social networking game interface/template library to be applied universally across multiple clients while allowing for unique and integrated branding per implementation.

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• Game Direction / Design
  

  Design and create as well as direction of other designers on game concepts, functionality and production. Games include a slot machine, match and win (memory), golf and basketball skill games, fan frenzy, scratch and win and other chance games.

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• Website Design / Production
  

  Creating, building and developing highly functional sites that meet client needs/wants, while still offering high quality designs that are flexible and web compliant.

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Graphic Designer with Wilton Industries (The Westin Gallery)

This role provided and required many avenues of creative thinking and execution for print, package, display and product design.

• Monitor and direct printing processes with overseas vendors.
• Design photo frames for multiple product lines with various materials such as wood, copper, aluminum, steel, resin or a combination of materials.
• Trained existing employees on new design software.
• Stage showroom for client presentations.

Software - Primary: Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, InDesign, Acrobat

Software - Secondary: Flash, other Adobe products, typical Office software

Skills: HTML and CSS expert, cross browser compatibility, jQuery, clean/practical/UI & UX, user-friendly web design, PC and Mac user, problem solver, fast learner, efficient, team player, leader

Bachelor of Arts in Graphic Design

Eastern Illinois University, 1994 - 1997

Graphic Arts

Triton College, 1992 - 1994

2 Day CSS Conference

An Event Apart, 2007

Email: jason@designspouse.com

Phone: (847) 801-9004

LinkedIn: LinkedIn.com/in/JasonARoss - See recommendations on LinkedIn

Location: Greater Chicago Area

Portfolio: View Portfolio