My name is Laura Escobar, also known as Laurie. I'm a salvadoran illustrator passionate about stories, inspired by sci-fi and fueled with music. I solve complex time-sensitive puzzles for a living.
I started as a graphic designer over a decade ago, and ever since my love for illustrations grew up to the point that it became second nature to me. Most of my learning related to illustration has been self-taught; the spark of curiosity always present and pushing me to study specific topics like color, light, composition, realism, render styles and many more, but also taking independent workshops in anatomy, matte painting and concept art.
I lead, coach and develop a distributed Product Design team that works with many clients and industries in the United States, while growing and thriving as professionals in their craft.
I started as a UX Designer with them, but my support for Product and Development increased over the course of four different projects, so my role naturally evolved into Product Designer. I worked closely with theirs and Applaudo's team to develop products that drive some of their core operations and providing tangible results on a day-to-day basis:
• Maintain a strategic vision of the product by adding value that ties-in with the business goals.
• Evolve and integrate multiple workflows into streamlined systems of invoicing and stats reports, creating an efficient and optimized process that incorporates a consistent visual language.
• Document projects from ideation to final hand-off, providing comprehensive and substantial material for all parts involved to use as a truthful source of information during and after the design process is completed.
• Ensure ethically humane products by applying UX guidelines, intuitive interaction design and industry-standard best practices.
As UX/UI Designer I advocated for human-centered product design from start to finish: Leading discovery sessions, stakeholder briefing, UX Strategy and Information Architecture all the way to high fidelity mockups and prototyping. This workflow requires close communication and collaboration with design, product and development teams, with whom I facilitated workshops and conducted User Testing.
In the UX Design team, I supported initiatives that led to increase design maturity through constant learning, skills development and process improvement, promoting new frameworks and methodologies like 8pt grid, Design Sprint and Design Systems. In parallel with that, I took part in the hiring process alongside HHRR to find the best talent and mentoring junior hires thereafter.
I led the design of a wide variety of product developments, identifying the best user flow for each case, implementing user experience best practices and solving the user's pain points by focusing on human centered design principles.
I had the opportunity of incorporating Figma as the centralized design and prototyping tool, improving the time investment, developer handoff, stakeholder feedback and overall team communication, which helped ultimately to integrate efficiently the design stage into the software development process.
Remote work for a worldwide indie studio.
Props and enviroment illustrator for in-game puzzles and matte painting for the opening sequence of the game "Sherlock: The Game is On"