All design work for Splash Damage is under NDA
Due to this, I am unable to show designs or visuals from my time at Splash Damage. Instead, here is a breakdown of achievements & responsibilities during my tenure. Thanks in advance for your understanding.
Notable achievements
Led design strategy and execution for a AAA multi-platform videogame
Liaised with C-suite execs and directors; scoped and assigned work to a team of UX Designers and UI Artists. I was solely accountable for the quality and delivery of the UI for a large-scale, high-budget videogame.
Created a multi-platform scaling system
With the UI team, built a scaling typographic system that would ensure we could use one design that would scale gracefully across different viewports & screen resolutions. This gave us a solid foundation to build the UI upon and even made support for future mobile/streaming platforms possible.
Secured a promotion for a direct report
Through mentorship, I coached a direct report in my team to grow his UX, UI and design leadership skills, securing him a promotion to Senior UX Designer within one year of joining the company.
Took responsibility for front-end UI implementation
As a UX/UI team, we successfully learned to implement front-end UI designs into Unreal Engine 4, alleviating UI Development of the responsibility and increasing their capacity to prioritise backend and systems work by approx. 30%.
Defined industry-leading accessibility features
Created a series of accessibility commitments for the project that competed with the highest achievers in the industry at the time of creation. To ensure these were achievable and wouldn't be de-scoped, I cross-checked all of these with the relevant team leads and signed off the commitments with the entire leadership team, assigning team leads to be accountable for each commitment. This set a new standard for the studio and received praise from stakeholders.
Responsibilities
Leadership
- Line management
- Staff mentoring
- Design department process setup
- Stakeholder management & presentation
- Project/task estimation, planning & assignment
- Design brief creation
- Team guidance, design feedback & signoff
UX
- User research
- Persona creation
- Competitor analysis
- Player testing & surveying
- IA & workflow diagrams
- Wireframing
- Accessibility
- Font scaling solution
- UX design system creation & management
- Developer handoff & design spec creation
Visual Design & Implementation
- Workshopping
- Concept & art direction development
- Style guide creation
- Screen design
- Visual design system creation & management
- Icon design
- Accessibility
- Developer feedback & liaison
- Feature implementation using Unreal Engine 4
Testimonials from Splash colleagues
Robert Macdonald – Head of UI & Accessibility
"I hired Jon in 2020 as a Lead UI Designer to run a team of UI Designers and establish and drive the UI UX vision for one of our titles under development at Splash Damage.
From the very first day, Jon was always a genuine pleasure to work with. A diligent, pragmatic, professional UI designer and leader who served in the best interests of his team and his project. Under his leadership, Jon nurtured and grew the talent of his reports resulting in both a successful promotion and growing responsibilities for his team members.
Jon’s love of UI and his deep understanding of UI development consistently yielded designs that reflected the outcomes of research, maintained a high level of precision, considered accessibility, and through iteration and refinement, sold the game experience intent to the widest audience possible.
As the project UI team lead, Jon championed UI and the user experience to the game leadership team, providing expert UI insight and knowledge-sharing opportunities to his leadership peers. Jon also took this sharing experience one step further and recommended knowledge-sharing strategies and UI workflows which have been adopted across the UI department at Splash Damage.
Jon is regarded as a model UI Designer Lead at Splash Damage and an expert in UI and UX design. Jon has my highest recommendation and I sincerely believe he will be a star asset to all the future projects blessed with his talent."
Steve Venezia – Associate Creative Director
"Jon was an absolute pleasure to work with. He listened carefully to my feedback on the game's UI and art style and excelled at translating that feedback to his team and consistently leading them to deliver an improved product.
You can tell a lot about a leader by looking at their team, and Jon's team was always positive and had an excellent can-do attitude even during turbulent times, and I believe a lot of that is down to Jon's inspiring leadership and organizational skills.
On top of that, I always appreciated Jon's own UI and art skills as he consistently delivered excellent mockups and wireframes that were a joy to review.
I highly recommend Jon and hope to work with him again in the future."
Filippo Marchiafava – Senior UI Designer
"I had the pleasure of working with Jon over the past two years. Jon demonstrated excellent leadership skills in a highly structured and organized manner while focusing on providing the best player experience by anticipating the needs and asking the right questions in the context of a challenging project. Jon's strong communication skills enable him to build consensus and alignment on UX strategy across product teams, leadership, and stakeholders effortlessly. He taught me a lot about communicating complex UX problems, insights, and solutions. I honestly cannot recommend Jon highly enough. He is always happy to mentor, support, and motivate others, which makes him a pleasure to work with."
Further info
Tools
Adobe XD, Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, Unreal Engine 4, JIRA, Confluence, Miro, Microsoft Office Suite