Gregory Korn Design & Illustration

Hi, I’m Greg.

I’m a full-stack designer with over fifteen years of experience creating products, UX, visual systems, and interfaces across a wide variety of industries. In that time I’ve worked in companies ranging from early-stage D2C startups to established SaaS and B2B operations, and seen first-hand what works and what doesn’t in projects of all shapes and sizes.

Throughout it all I’ve been extremely lucky to work with and learn from a great many people who were true masters of their crafts, and who helped me to become intimately familiar with every step of the product design process from exploratory research to polished deliverables.

Today, my design philosophy rests on 3 foundations:

1. Recognize Data as Design: Whatever the product’s front-end aesthetics, the data model is the real design. Start there and work your way up.

2. Advocate for the User Across the Entire Design Process: A research-informed understanding of the user’s jobs to be done, working environments, professional dialect, and patterns of action (both on and off their devices) is essential to making good UX decisions. A good designer uses this understanding to act as an informed and convincing voice for the user throughout the entirety of the design process, from the establishment of the roadmap to pushing the final product.

3. Champion Process, Documentation, and Shared Language: These are the keys to building a healthy and durable design culture, and to maintaining effective collaboration between Design, Eng, and Product. Shared language and naming conventions, clean and well-documented design files, consistent process across departments, and easy access to research findings, metrics, KPIs, and design artifacts keep a design org strong and consistent across time and the coming and going of ICs.

Making all these things happen depends upon creating and nurturing a healthy, collaborative, and low-ego team culture, one that balances high expectations for deliverables with high compassion for the inevitable iterations required to arrive at the best solutions. Team members need to be comfortable voicing their ideas and receiving critique, while feeling empowered and supported enough to make bold decisions and take risks when necessary. In this area, I will bring your company a massive value add. I excel at establishing and maintaining a positive esprit de corps, and bring a contagious sense of enthusiasm, curiosity, and camaraderie wherever I go.

If you’re interested in working together, please drop me a line!