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Clarity

Marissa Louie

San Francisco Bay Area

Sr. UX Design Director at Pandora and SiriusXM, Chairwoman at Animoodles, and Founder of design communities Designers Guild and Designers Club (130k+ members). Previously: iOS Art Director at Apple, UX Design Director at Expedia, Principal Designer at Yahoo, Product Designer at Ness (acq. by OpenTable).

I'm an expert on:
- Modern and slick web and mobile design interfaces
- How to hire designers and build design teams/orgs
- How to become a world class designer
- Creating award-winning designs
- Design critique for iPhone and iPad Apps, websites, emails
- Becoming a Design Founder
- What it takes to get your company acquired
- Entrepreneurship
- Search engines, consumer Internet products

$8.33/min

Marissa donates to Welcome to WWF's global network ($1,460.81)

7

7 Calls

13

13 Reviews

32 minutes
Avg. call

Entrepreneurship Product Design Digital Marketing User Experience User Interface Design Photography Manufacturing Mobile applications Photoshop Creative Direction

Call me to talk about

Search and Recommendation Engines

I served as a Product Designer and acting PM for Yahoo Search (http://search.yahoo.com) and Ness Computing (restaurant and lifestyle search and recommendations engine), working with machine learning, backend, and frontend engineers to innovate on algorithms and product feature improvement.

Apple, Design, Designer, iOS, UX, UI, Mobile

Awarded with Apple's Best of 2012 for Ness Dining Guide (December 2012). Then hired by Apple to design for iPhone, iPad, and Web. Areas of experience: Product Design, Logos, Typography, Photography, Motion Graphics, Branding, and App Store Marketing.

http://malouie.com

Stuffed Animals, Teddy Bears, Toys, Toy Industry

As Co-Founder, CEO, and Chief Designer of Portola Plush Co., I oversee creative direction, design, prototyping, manufacturing, sales, marketing, and PR. I can answer any questions on how to start a toy business.

Entrepreneur, Startup, CEO

3x entrepreneur: Ad Village, HeroEx, Dilemma. Employed 50 people to successfully launch and run consumer tech startups. Received Leadership Awards from the California State Senate and California State Assembly. Currently advising four startups (in the nonprofit, education, beauty, and search engine spaces).

Answers 1
Reviews 13

Answers

Marissa Louie answered

What are the Dos and Donts when hiring a creative to do graphic design?

First, get a sense for what kind of design you like by looking on Dribbble.com. If you have any more q's, feel free to call me here on Clarity.

Schedule a call • Share • Flag

Graphic Design

Reviews

Marissa was extremely insightful, transparent and our conversation has given me much energy and information of what steps to take next in my particular journey & idea. I gladly recommend her insights!

Andreas Lopez Source: Clarity

Was a great pleasure can talk with Marissa about our problem.

She could give us a several hints and options for solve the situation and continue ahead with the project.

The Marissa experience with search engines and derivates, together with thier laboral experiences made the call great.

Thanks Marissa.

Sergio Cobos Ruiz Source: Clarity

Just had an awesome chat with Marissa. She had amazing input and brought valuable ideas to the table. I couldn't recommend setting up a cal with her more. And she donates her fees to animals. Win, win.

Justin Heinzer Source: Clarity

Marissa was extremely helpful on the call. She understands concepts quickly, has a very creative and active mind which leads to very valuable feedback. I have gained great direction in design and product positioning from talking to her. A true expert in her field. I highly recommend Marissa and look forward to working with her in the future.

milos citakovic Source: Clarity

Marissa's bright talent shines through at the executive level. She's uncanny at distilling a lot of complex information into a creative and simple solution, whether guiding a NYSE company's corporate expansion strategy or identifying and closing gaps in an IT infrastructure. She puts people at ease to the point of making the client CEO and CFO chuckle. No surprise, they loved her solutions!

Victor Cressac Source: LinkedIn

Marissa is a prodigy, and a rare talent in tech. She is incredible at synthesizing a large amount of information and creating a well-defined, easy-to-use product that is tailored to her clients' needs. She made thorough and streamlined wireframes, provided our UX Research Team with clever solutions, and was able to empathize deeply with each of her clients. She also was very thoughtful about bringing learnings from the UX Research Team into her software design, and her product requirements documents.

Her deep grasp of everything from software design to product to marketing to engineering architecture to coding sets her up for an incredible future as a leader in the tech industry. She will surprise you with her innovative ideas, and with her thorough problem solving skills - she can look at any problem from multiple angles and dimensions, and come up with the best possible solution. Lastly, Marissa motivates everyone around her with her genuine enthusiasm and positive attitude. Any team would be lucky to have Marissa on it, as a team player and a leader.

Victor Cressac Source: LinkedIn

Marissa has a true creative gift at UI Art Direction. She stood out as a sharp thinker who very carefully crafts the user experience.

She's great to work with as a design leader and designer. She was able to get up to speed with an established design language very quickly and thoroughly, and she came up with some very out of the box ideas for a project that we worked on together. She really cares about team culture and encouraged the team, including production designers and engineers, to come up with ideas.

Marissa has a very keen eye for details, including layouts, design production, and subtle things that others don't think about or see. I've also seen her make design revisions really quickly, very often ahead of schedule, which allowed her to pick up work from other designers. She's not afraid to pin her work up on the wall, for all to see and critique. Most of all, she has a rare ability to design visually arresting user experiences that focus on delighting and inspiring users in a clean, user-friendly way.

Lastly, Marissa is a quick and eager learner. She asked me to teach her about motion graphics design, and she was quickly able to sit next to me and work on a few nice motion graphics pieces that she had created the base designs for.

NguyenCat Le Source: LinkedIn

We collaborated briefly on a motion graphics project. Marissa has shown the quality of a sharp quick thinker - she is knowledgeable of the creative process from Art Director to Production Designer.

NguyenCat Le Source: LinkedIn

Marissa is incredibly dynamic and self-driven. She has an amazing work ethic. An early stage startup is a fast paced and chaotic environment and she repeatedly went above and beyond her job description to help the company succeed. She played an integral role in Ness' branding, user research, and customer development. Marissa's passion for design shown both in her work and in talking with other designers, so much so that she helped recruit a key member of our design team. Marissa's design work is evident throughout the Ness app and I would definitely work with her again.

Paul Twohey Source: LinkedIn

I had the good fortune of working with Marissa at Ness Computing for two and a half years. During that time Marissa had a tremendous arc of personal growth and developed her skillset in a ton of new directions. As if transitioning into a new role at the company wasn’t hard enough, Design is rather unique in its position at the intersection of high visibility and close scrutiny. Marissa was fearlessly up for the challenge and handled the shift without missing a step.

As a designer, Marissa is extremely hard-working, attentive, passionate, driven, and shows incredible initiative. She has strong product intuition and a clear vision honed by years of being closely involved with entrepreneurship. Although she is a bit newer to some of the production aspects of the job, she never stops looking for ways to improve herself and is a valuable addition to any team that is shipping products within the practical constraints of the marketplace. She’s more than willing to put in (sometimes scary!) hours to meet a deadline, but never compromises the quality of her work. She responds well to criticism and explores the solution space to problems quickly, efficiently, and tirelessly. Professional skills aside, Marissa is hilarious, has a great spirit, and would be a terrific contribution to the atmosphere of any workplace.

After seeing how quickly her design acumen developed in such a short amount of time, I can’t wait to see where she goes in the future!

Yige Wang Source: LinkedIn

Even from my first encounter with Marissa at Carnegie Mellon University, I was genuinely impressed by her exuberance and passion. She is always eager to learn and to share her knowledge with others. Not only does she deliver high quality work, she will go to great lengths to ensure that her ideas are communicated clearly and concisely, even if that entails working after hours and late into the the night.

Marissa has a strong sense and passion for great design. During my time working at Ness Computing, she took on an incredibly ambitious project and delivered great results. Her strong sense of user experience design along with her past experiences with iOS and Internet marketing brings an unique perspective to the design team that often results in unexpected and out-of-the-box ideas.

Aside from her strong technical skills, she is also effective at both providing feedback to team members and incorporating feedback into her designs. The numerous design critiques I've had with Marissa and the rest of the design team is concrete evidence of how she is able to eloquently provide constructive feedback, support, and praise to her team members. Nonetheless, even though she was senior to me, she made sure that my opinions were heard at all times and respected all my inputs.

It was definitely an honor for me to have worked with Marissa, and I would not hesitate to work with her again in any capacity!

Jackson Chu Source: LinkedIn

Member since March 2013