I am available for hire full-time.
Resumes are kinda lame, I think you'll like this little site better. Scroll on down the page to understand how I can serve you, and see if we're a great fit!
As a young boy, my family started to call me “Atom Smasher” a comic book character from the 80's. Ever since then it's been a nickname, although Adam is my real name.
The creativity in my life started with my father, who would often show me how to draw cartoon faces.
In middle school I attended standard art classes as well wood shop. I made a pretty sweet cutting board that my mother still has on her counter!
I elected to take several art-focused classes including painting, sculpture, and drawing.
During my last two years of high school I was introduced to Photoshop and Quark by a few friends working on the school newspaper. I was hooked from that point on!
I attended college at The International Academy of Design and Technology in Chicago, Illinois.
In 2001 I received my Associate of Applied Science in Computer Graphics / Graphic Design. I immediately returned to pursue a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Multimedia Production and Design, received at the end of 2002.
Since graduating college, my career has been nothing short of awesome.
For specific experience and technical details, please download my resume.
Some prefer to call it process or approach, I say call it whatever you like, really.
I start every project with research. I believe it is the most important part of understanding what we're building, who we're building for, our competitors, and so much more.
Research is both internal: to understand the goals and milestones, and external: to understand similar products, tools, etc.
Interviews are the next important piece to a project. A user interview allows our team a unique, outsider's perspective. By conducting the proper research, we can now target the correct users to interview.
User interviews are typically conducted with internal team members, stakeholders, existing users, future users, customer service employees and more.
Developing, documenting and maintaining user personas for your products is a key ingredient to ensure we are meeting the needs of our users.
I like to handle user personas like a style guide - a living document that should always be up-to-date. That also provides huge value to the entire organization.
Defining a strategy for your product can be the secret sauce that so many organizations scratch their heads over.
I can help define an interface, interaction, gamification, and experience strategy alongside the team.
Understanding and documenting the architecture of the product is another valuable artifact within an organization.
The architecture documentation serves to help every department understand interconnected views and functionality they may not be aware of.
One of my favorite parts of the design process is sketching. Sketching comes in the form of a pencil and paper or a marker and a whiteboard.
It's the discovery, collaboration, and deep thinking that I love about this part of the creative process.
Creating wireframes is the point in a project where things start to have a heart beat. It is where stakeholders and the team begin to see things come to life. Where smiles get bigger.
I prefer to start wireframes as simple, static, grayscale line art. As progress and approval funnels in, I begin to add simple interactions that eventually turn into complex interactions. I am a big fan of Axure.
I love interaction design. I enjoy prototyping with tools such as Axure, my personal favorite. I also enjoy designing directly in the browser.
Prototypes bring life to a wireframe. They show developers the guts of what they are building and make designers push themselves to think about complex micro interactions.
Visual / User Interface Design is another passion for me, it's how I got started in this industry. I find a lot of pleasure in applying the branding, typography, and styles to new product or feature.
I enjoy this phase of a project because it really brings out the excitement of the stakeholders and team. It also starts to blend the major components of the user experience together.
Documentation is a crucial piece of communication that bridges the gap of a wireframe, visual design, or prototype, and the implementation. It allows the designer to communicate to the engineering team the tiny bits of vision that all of our combined tools today cannot.
Here's a neat article I wrote on combining prototypes with a specification.
One of the characteristics that make me unique is my deep knowledge of the front-end. I have a very strong understanding of HTML and CSS. I have worked in just about every language and stack.
I enjoy engineering HTML and CSS architecture, style guides, interface components and responsive implementations of the product. There's something special about building your design directly alongside the engineering team. The collaboration and velocity gained in this phase is very valuable.
Working within each of these areas, or "in the trenches" as I call it, is what I love to do! My brain is wired to think this way and I am lucky to have found this gift intersecting with my career.
The most current portfolio samples I have cannot be listed publicly on my website or emailed as PDFs. Please contact me to see them.
Here are some things that I love outside of my career passions.
A few of my favorites: Lean UX, The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, Davinci Code, Lost Symbol, Inferno, The Servant, Tender Warrior, The Bible
I grew up camping with my mother and father as a young boy and later my father and I camped a lot too. Today, wy wife and I enjoy camping a lot. Our latest trip was the entire Northwest sector of the States. It was pretty relaxing!
The outdoors are awesome! It is my relief from sitting behind a computer most of the time. Hiking is something my wife and I love to do!
More of an obsession than anything, bass fishing is something I do about 3-4 times a week. There's nothing better than being on the water hunting down one of the greatest fresh water predators.
My bride is nothing short of awesome. She's the most important person in my life and I can't say enough good things about her!
The pug man. I picked up Ollie at just six weeks old. He's a great friend and companion. He received is name from my past of skateboarding.
Eeyore. I inherited the great Pippin upon marrying my wife. He's a rescued beagle, coonhound mix that is nothing short of hilarious all the time.
© 2015 Atom Groom. All rights reserved.
aka: Be cool, don't steal things.
Interested in how the site was built?
Checkout the repository.