CV
Jason Lara
Creative Strategy | Art Direction | Graphic Design
Design-thinking, creative professional with 25+ years of agency, start-up, and entrepreneurial experience bringing all forms of ideas to life — then managing innovation cycles to keep those ideas healthy, relevant, and growing. Firm believer in the primacy of the customer experience. Articulate communicator adept at defining and solving problems, building and leading creative teams, developing brands, and to put it crudely (but effectively), being the one that does everything it takes to make sure all the shit gets done.
— Work Experience —
Proof Advertising & Marketing
Austin, Texas
Associate Creative Director
July 2023 - Present
Responsible for all agency creative for banking software platform client, Kasasa.
-
Liaise with client’s marketing director to plan and execute all creative output.
-
Work in client’s Jira and SharePoint instances to receive, coordinate, execute, and deliver all creative assets and trained internal agency resources on those systems.
-
Develop processes to speed up production of client’s constant stream of requests and led review-and-revise cycles that resulting doubling and sometimes tripling speed of output.
-
Lead and mentor agency resources involved in the production the creative.
-
In addition to work on principal client, step in as an additional resource where needed for additional clients, including Subway, Grease Monkey Automotive, and others.
SwagHub
Austin, Texas
Design Director
December 2020 - July 2023
Established and directed the design department for SwagHub, a start-up that provided a new and better way for businesses to use branded merchandise to spread the word about themselves.
-
Led small team and was principal designer of the user experience and user interface output for SwagHub’s proprietary 3-application platform.
-
Worked closely with the platform’s development resource via agile sprint methodology to bring the platform from concept to prototype to launch.
-
Manage a group of designers in America and overseas who used our platform to create and deploy designs for products and online stores, leveraging hundreds of product templates that allowed for quick mockups and store designs.
-
Personally designed and launched stores for dozens of clients, averaging under 2 weeks per store fully stocked with products branded with client creative.
Continion
Austin, Texas
Co-founder & VP Client Experience
June 2010 - December 2020
Co-founded the company and for ten years, oversaw all creative and user-experience output produced by our team of designers for clients of all sizes.
-
Developed for launch all the design elements of the Seeds program for Home Depot, including identity, UX, UI, and platform design. Within weeks of launch, we took their dedicated reviewer roster from 0 to several hundred, reaching this goal nearly two months ahead of schedule.
-
Served as design lead on creation of new offering from the world’s largest ratings and reviews platform, Bazaarvoice. Their Sampling program went from a pilot program with a single client to serving hundreds of clients in under a year, becoming an integral pillar of their software platform, driving millions of dollars of revenue annually.
-
Designed interface for and launched a massive ratings and reviews portal for Walt Disney World's hotels, restaurants, and attractions, successfully adhering to Disney’s complex design guidelines.
-
Lead creative efforts to design and launch websites for the Millstone Medical and CIS Group, two of the nation’s largest entities in the post-manufacture medical services
— Additional Work Highlights —
M Group Agency
Austin, Texas
Strategic Partner - Marketing Technology and Digital Creative
January 2011 - November 2019
In partnership with M Group, I helped improve the digital products of clients such as Global Access, St. Edward's University, Texas Methodist Foundation and Texas Advocacy Project.
Kolar Advertising and Marketing
Austin, Texas
Senior Interactive Art Director
June 2004 - June 2010
I was a key creative leader in the development of websites, interactive presentations, banners, and rich media campaigns for clients such as Dell, 3M, United States Army, SUBWAY, Cargill, and Baylor University.
True North Inc.
New York, New York
Art Director
October 2003 - May 2005
I worked on digital creative for Walt Disney/Buena Vista Home Entertainment and Maxim Magazine.
— Capabilities —
Skills
-
Strategic Planning
-
Brand Strategy
-
Team Lead
-
Presentations
-
Information Architecture
-
UX
-
UI
-
Logo Design
Software
-
Adobe Creative Suite
-
Microsoft Office Suite
-
Figma
-
Apple Productivity Suite (Keynote, Pages, Numbers)
-
Managing content in Wordpress, Wix, ExpressionEngine, Squarespace, HubSpot etc.
Languages
-
English (native speaker)
-
Brazilian Portuguese (fluent: communication;
working proficiency: reading/writing) -
Spanish (intermediate working proficiency)
— Education —