Creator of DAZ Studio and massive 3D asset marketplace for use with it. Web site design, digital marketing materials, UI design and 3D design.
Design Lead &
Frontend Development
I spent almost 7 years at DAZ 3D. First as Lead Designer for Marketing and then as Lead Designer for the Web and Applications team. Web UI/UX, Marketing material design, user flow and practicality were the areas of focus.
Web Design
Marketing Design
UI Design
Daz3D & Morph3D
On the web team at DAZ, my responsibilities mostly fell under a new design and user flow for the main website and content store. I worked with input from all corners of the company to come up with a more streamlined, focused downloading and library purchase process, leading to the best 3 concurrent sales years in company history.
Morph 3D was born late in my time at DAZ. A new brand and partnership for converting DAZ content into VR and Gaming assets for licensing.
“Jeff was essential in breathing new life into the DAZ 3D website design and establishing a new, standardized aesthetic for all the brands under the DAZ umbrella.”
Jon Middleton
Web Director
Software & Skills
Magento
Driving the vast majority of DAZ3D.com. Full skinning & functionality extension.
WordPress
The backbone to the Blog & News sections. Full skinning & extension.
Adobe
Design in Photoshop, Illustrator & inDesign software suites.
Git
Fully version controlled with test and sandbox servers through Github.
HTML/SCSS
Hand coded HTML and SCSS for all Magento and WordPress templates.
Javascript
Intermediate frontend javascript including DOM manipulation and effects.
DAZ Studio
With some 3D experience in my early career, I was excited to learn the product I was working for. By year 2 I was often composing and rendering my own artwork for promotions or the website itself. It was an invaluable resource.
Marketing Design
The first position I worked at DAZ was Lead Designer for the Marketing Team, providing product focused sale pages, banners and email blasts on a daily basis for the tens of products that launched each day at DAZ. Our team met each morning to chat about the product launches, sale themes and rules set by the marketing director in our calendar. By noon myself and the other designers would have our visual themes ready for the mark-up and email teams.
Fast-Paced, Daily Marketing
The marketing team was a fast, sometimes hectic environment with daily deliverables on a constant product flow. The calendar also had a tendency to change at the last minute. The team would often have to pivot mid-day to accommodate product release needs.
Fast Turnover
The DAZ product pipeline had 15-30 new products to launch and market daily.
Detail Critical
Changing launch and sale details required a keen eye for detail.
Multi-Team Input
Balancing the needs of multiple teams and management was a constant.
Agility
Adapting to daily changing product flow challenges was a non stop effort.
MorphLab UI
MorphLab was the application for importing DAZ Content into Unity. It provided full granular control of hierarchy, textures, skeletons, LOD information and everything else needed for the conversion. Unfortunately the app was never released publicly, as the conversion process ended up being much more difficult than anticipated.
Epilogue
DAZ Is still alive and kicking. Operating somewhere out of West Jordan last I knew.
It was one of the best places to work in tech while I was there. I’ll never forget the people it brought into my life and the skills I honed there.