Rhys Thomas

I currently lead a small team of designers tackling websites, intranets and portals across the NHS and Social Housing sectors. I continue to deliver customer projects, working across the whole creative process - conducting user requirements gathering workshops, wireframing, high fidelity designs, full site builds and post-live support. I have been fundamental in creating one of VerseOne's newest solutions - Life Stories - a digital reminiscence autobiography for those living with alzheimer's.

I have led Creative Services projects, and facilitated performance marketing in a variety of business landscapes. I operated independently to estimate work, apply due processes, create and assign Jira tickets where appropriate, present to clients and work through feedback for go live. As a Sr. Creative Designer, I dealt primarily with; UI / visual design, wireframing and prototyping, website / cart design, functionality building with jQuery, UX audit analysis, WordPress integration, site optimisation with Maxymiser, mentoring associate designers, acting as an intermediary between teams, and technical / creative consultation for sales.

Working within the MarketForce team at Digital River, I produced marketing creatives for a range of clients. I worked with Lenovo, Sennheiser, Nuance, Razer, Jabra, Logitech, Norton, Kaspersky and Avast, among others. These spanned multiple channels, including; Paid Search, Email and Affiliate. Most of my work took the form of web page design and build, email design and build, static and animated graphic banners.

Whilst at Mudvark (a small independent games studio), we produced an educational tablet game for 10-14yr olds. I was the Principle Designer, responsible for the interaction design, level design, sound design, dialogue/educational content writing, storyboarding and documentation. I worked closely with the developer, 3d artist and product owner to deliver milestone updates to the stakeholders and action feedback from testing sessions.

Being placed in the Yell premium design team allowed me to work on larger accounts, designing and building Yell's flagship website products. During this period I contributed to the migration of 50,000+ sites to a new CMS, and designed or built over 300 SMB websites across 3 different platforms. Because of my depth of system knowledge and work ethic, I was relied upon to cover the team's task distribution in my manager's stead, and troubleshoot both design and tech issues across all teams. I was a point of contact for our offshore studio, and ran the weekly design review to increase product quality.

I graduated with a 1st Class BA Hons. in Computer Games Design.

The computer games design course at USW brought together everything I loved about being creative:- Drawing imaginary worlds, and dreaming up inhabitants. Designing things like maps, journeys and narratives. Understanding through film and animation how to convey story and emotion. And then merging it all with a technical understanding of 3d modelling, game engines and player interactions. The long-standing notion was that interactive media (games) is just another method of expressing your creativity, and that the player's experience should be at the forefront of everything you do.