Angelo Outlaw
Designer • Teacher • Pilot
About
I'm a digital designer, front-end developer, and educator with a unique blend of creative sensibility and technical ability. After designing for print in my early career, I transitioned to digital design and have pushed pixels and written code ever since. Nowadays, I've been focused on leading the teams that tie it all together. This path, combined with endless curiosity and too many hobbies, has given me an eclectic and wide-ranging set of skills. Also, yes, that really is my last name!
Experience
I focus on making sure our website experiences are easy, useful, and enjoyable for people—and that this quality drives the success of what we make. To accomplish this, I partner with the executive team and product owners to provide strategic oversight for a range of responsibilities including product owners, design, development, content, accessibility, and quality assurance.
I crafted and taught a curriculum built to be accessible to students with no digital design experience. This curriculum used a human-centered approach that referenced real-world scenarios intended build comfort levels among students. By the end of the course, students were confident working in digital environments and comfortable articulating their decisions using industry-standard language and best practices.
I directly managed a talented multidisciplinary team with subject matter experts including UX/UI design, development, content, accessibility, and quality assurance. Within this context, I grew the team by 20% and was directly involved in the company’s web-based response to the COVID-19 pandemic (while social distancing of course), improvements to site accessibility, and the release of numerous partner-specific microsites and purchase applications.
It all started when I went to an industry conference and felt like I didn’t know anyone. I signed up for a calligraphy class and during the class, someone from the AIGA board of directors invited me to an open board meeting. I attended, and what followed was explosive personal growth driven my a newfound love and understanding of how important community is in the creative industry. I served on the AIGA board in various capacities and was eventually elected as President of the San Diego chapter. I held the President position for the full length of a term between 2018 - 2020.
Using my previous experience with digital and interactive design, email marketing, and web development, I did exactly those things for Mitchell International. The thing that made this position different is that it became clear I was ready to break into more of a leadership role. The experience I gained at Mitchell gave me the confidence to make that leap.
I designed and developed web pages, email templates, and landing pages that supported marketing campaigns targeting the video security industry. I was responsible for managing the CMS of the website, and I also created a company-wide PowerPoint template (I KNOW...don’t tell anyone) and produced and recorded training videos to support the internal effort.
I was responsible for ad hoc DevOps tasks for a wide variety of small to medium size clients. In addition, I performed limited web design support for those clients in situations where they wanted to combine that expertise with their other requests.
+ Senior Graphic Designer + Graphic Designer This was my first “real” job after college. I started as a very entry level designer, and worked my way up through various roles over my time with the company. This experience was formative, as I was exposed a wide variety of design challenges. These challenges were often paired with equally challenging business requirements and/or restrictions that both guided and limited the design process. I started as a strictly print-based designer, and leaned more toward web design as my personal preferences changed and the needs of the business provided opportunities.
This is where it all started. A career in design went from dream to reality. However, it certainly wasn’t based on my skills...at first. I met the hiring manager while I worked at the bookstore as a cashier. She later told me that they knew I had very little experience (I wasn’t even in the major yet) and that they took a chance because they could use me as a model, and then let me go if I couldn’t deliver on the design aspects of the job. Luckily, I did. I designed and produced vast quantities of course materials, book covers, POP signage, price labels, product labels, event flyers, and so on.
I sold shoes! As the Third Key Manager, I was the senior shoe salesperson during my shifts, which really means I was the first to arrive and the first to leave but did not actually manage anyone. This job taught me a lot about being service-minded, working with money, and how to interact with customers directly. It was a fun environment full of youthful exuberance, loud music, and cool shoes. Lots of shoes.
Work
Contact
I’d love to hear from you. Reach out and let’s talk about anything you want. Except spiders. I don’t want to talk about spiders.