A Bit More About Me*
I am a designer who loves to make things, build teams, and support others in doing so.
I started my career by co-founding a small digital studio called Airglow Studios in my hometown of Maastricht. As founders, we did not see much good web and digital product work coming out of our country and our region.
Throughout the lifetime of the studio, we took on clients to pay the bills and worked on crazy ideas to see how far we could push the technologies we had available. This meant that we worked on a wide variety of projects. From creating a 3D engine in Flash*, to single page web applications**, to having an intercom microphone at our office we could speak to website visitors through. This escalated even further when we started experimenting with a Nintendo Wii controller-enabled head-tracking 3D Pong game, to developing a Nintendo DS game, and so many more fascinating little things.
After five years at the studio, I felt the need to strike out on my own and focus purely on design, not the implementation and upkeep services that were taking up a lot of mental space. This very quickly led me to work remotely as a contract designer for Instagram, and six months later I had moved to San Francisco to work there full-time.
Most recently, I led the digital product and design team at Glossier, where I helped transform the technology organization to become more outcome driven, and lead a full redesign of glossier.com. This re-design was based on a brand new design system that took all of the best bits of Glossier's design and brand, while pushing for customer experience consistency, and design and development velocity of new features.
After taking a year off, I recently started designing at Brex to focus on “Special Projects” (big bets that we believe will have an meaningfully positive effect on our customers, starting with our mobile product.)
Over time, I'll expand on this space*. For a summarized work history, feel free to check out the page below.
Work
Here is a brief history of what I have been up to professionally in the last decade and a half.
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Brex
2021 – Now
In 2021, I joined Brex as a Principal Designer and Design Director. The theme of my role here is “Special Projects” (big opportunities that we believe will have an meaningfully positive effect on our customers).
So far, I have led the genesis and growth of our Mobile product and team, and have focused on our career frameworks, hiring practices, and growing our design team to a healthy ratio within the business.
Now I lead two of our organizations that focus on Empower. You can read some more thoughts in Joining Brex.
Hiatus & Exploration
2020
In October of 2019 I took a break from being in a full-time role to take some rest, watch some movies, play some video games, and read some books. I did spend a little bit of time on advising, investing, and exploring new projects.
Towards the end of 2020 I wanted to go back to where I started my career, which was as a hybrid designer slash front-end developer. So I dug deeper into modern web technologies, brushing up on over half a decade of new ways of working, and explored photo sharing and photo hosting by building out different iterations of Shoebox.
Glossier
2018 – 2019
I originally joined Glossier as their Head of Design, but took over the Product role soon after. In this role, I helped transform the technology organization away from being service-oriented to the organization, turning it into an organization focused on driving measurable results.
This led a full redesign of Glossier.com, based on a new design system and the rebuilding of a couple of key pieces of infrastructure to drive site speed, reliability, and ultimately sales conversion.
Facebook
2014 – 2018
At Facebook I worked at the intersection of design and product strategy, leading a re-design of the search engine, supporting multiple efforts on the local team (including a prototype of hyperlocal with bluetooth beacons), and leading the product experimentation team.
Instagram
2011 – 2014
As one of the earliest members of the Instagram team, I worked as a design lead (and sometimes engineer). Some of the most notable projects I got to work on were: completely redesigning instagram.com (including our move to React), re-designing for iOS7, designing the first tools for businesses and kicking off the first data-driven growth projects.
Airglow Studios
2006 – 2011
As design co-founder, I led all of the design and creative efforts, as well as general company strategy — shifting us through our transformation from a web studio to focus on apps and games across web and mobile.
Colophon
Supporting Services
- Photos powered by Shoebox.
Technological Nerdy Bits
Designy Bits
- Typeset in: Geomanist by atipo foundry.
Special Thanks
- Brian Lovin, Max Stoiber and Mike Meyer for site inspiration and dealing with a deluge of coding questions from time to time.
- About page photo by Dave Johannes.
Hi! Hey! Wow. Fancy finding you here at the bottom of the page. Can't believe you made it this far! Whew. This site is being designed and iterated on in public. If you see something that looks off, please reach out and let me know!
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© 2003 - 2024 Maykel Loomans