My name is John.
I'm a digital product designer passionate about
crafting social change.
My Story
D
uring an incredible chapter at Clearleft, a top UX agency in the UK, I worked in a multi-disciplinary team to solve complex business problems using human-centered design. I dove deeper into the craft of digital design and discovered the key elements of a successful project. I honed my tools as a designer and realized the potential to apply what I learned towards a pressing humanitarian crisis.
Helping Refugees Prosper
While at Clearleft, I worked nights and weekends to start an initiative called Prosper—a diverse community of digital professionals working together to help refugees prosper in Europe. With a distributed team of volunteers, we built a central database of refugee crisis initiatives and began moving towards a more sustainable long-term model.
Moving Forward
Having found my niche at the intersection of digital design and social change, I've had the pleasure of working on some really exciting organizations including a seed-funded Silicon Valley startup called Yodas and a professional apprenticeship program in specialty coffee for unemployed youth called Pro Baristas . In the years ahead I look forward to becoming a master of my craft while sharpening my skills as a designer on complex and meaningful problems that beg to make a difference in the world.
Feel free to check out my portfolio below to get a sense of how I work. If there's anything you'd like to discuss, you can send me an email or find me on Twitter.
Portfolio
Investing all that I am into all that I do
Prosper App
Digital Product Design
As the founder of Prosper Community, I led a distributed team of over 100 volunteers to design and build an open source product that helps relief organizations make sense of "who is doing what—where" amidst the refugee crisis.
View Case Study
Prosper Community
Startup Founder
As a response to the crisis in Europe, I founded a community of digital workers around the belief that "When refugees prosper, we all prosper". In four months the team grew from one person to ninety, and we successfuly launched an open source product to help refugees, volunteers and donors find projects that meet their needs.
View Case Study
Clearleft
UX Research, Strategy & Design
I worked with a team of user experience designers at Clearleft to research and define new business concepts within the landscape of design training and education. I designed and facilitated human-centered workshops to shape the narrative of our process. I pitched the new business concepts to Clearleft executives and celebreated as several of the concepts were taken on by the organization.
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Thengine
UX Research, Strategy & Design
I led research and design for a startup out of the Founders Institute based in Denver, Colorado. From user interviews to prototyping and usability testing, I helped shape the vision and execution of a seed-funded startup that created tools for local musicians and their fans.
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SPRKY Chess
Product Design & Development
For the capstone of The Firehose Project, we crafted an open source chess app using Ruby on Rails. With Test-Driven Development (TDD) as our guide, we built every element of the application—from the back-end Ruby to the front-end Javascript. The project was featured in an article on the Huffington Post.
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Clients & Collaborators
Hear what others have to say
Natasha Freidus
“John led our product team through discovery and research into prototyping and through several iterations. I was very impressed by John's capacity as a designer, as a team leader, and as a writer. John will go out of his way to make sure clients are happy with the final product.”
Aaron Washburn
“Creative, professional, insightful and meticulous. Our team depended on John's UX expertise to create a clean, compelling face for our product. But behind the scenes, it was his relentless drive to understand, refactor, simplify and clarify our code that made working with John such a fantastic learning experience for me.”
Michael Catlin
“John understood our vision and crafted it into reality. He was the guy who took charge and made it happen. From business strategy to user needs, he was a rockstar.”
Michael McDaniel
“John Ellison is passionate about helping visionaries accomplish their dreams, and his medium for doing so is the web. His ability to design and code fluently in the browser made it easy for me to realize a web project that was central to my career.