Zoomed out

Award-winning Design Leader specializing in building impactful teams, systems, and products.

Zoomed in
 

I’m a creative problem solver with 15 years of experience building brands and businesses. From products to systems to entire teams, I use design as a means to engage, communicate, and build trust. I find nothing more fulfilling than distilling complex ideas into simple, yet significant and engaging interfaces.

Let’s get into it ↓

Only In Your State @ World Of Good | WIP. Email chris@skae.design for a sneak peak

Conceived and led the end-to-end launch of an AI-powered travel planner leveraging LLMs and ML. Webby Winner for AI, Travel & Leisure.

World Of Good Brands | WIP: email chris@skae.design for a sneak peak

Zenith Design System

Spearheaded & governed the creation of Zenith, a scalable multi-brand design system. Resulting in 115% boost to core web vitals, page views per session up 14%, 11% drop in bounce rate, and revenue per session up 60% across our core properties.

Conversion Funnel @ EcoCart

Led the product evolution from scrappy MVP to a scalable V2 of EcoCart’s core product. Driving a 28% lift in user adoption and a 50% drop in support requests and tickets.

Parcel @ Group Nine Media

By centralizing metadata, licensing, and performance insights, Parcel unlocked a new revenue stream and improved operational efficiency—empowering teams to make smarter, faster decisions with their content.

Negroni Design System @ Group Nine Media -> Vox Media

The proprietary Design System powering the front-end of every brand in Group Nine Media’s growing portfolio. This system maintains a consistent user experience across our products, makes new features available cross-brand with wild efficiency, and drastically reduces redundant coding, qa, and support all without sacrificing brand expression. Most importantly, it freed up my nimble team to focus on new priorities vs reinventing the wheel. Cheers 🥃.

Group Nine Media -> Vox Media

NowThis News →

“Homepage. Even the word sounds old. We bring the news to your social feed.” That simple brand-defining mission helped NowThis build a herculean one-of-a-kind brand that reaches over 80% of millennials in the US. It also meant their web experience needed to break the mold of traditional media just as much as their brand has.

Group Nine Media -> Vox Media

Content Creator Tools →

List-style recommendations are Group Nine’s most successful top-of-funnel content strategy. While they achieve their primary goal of generating significant traffic, they failed to achieve KPIs central to our success…All while requiring a significant amount of manual data collection & entry by our production teams, resulting in a lackluster experience for our readers.