Australia

Bachelor of Architecture

Industrial Product Design (Honours)

Catalina Millan

Senior Design Consultant / Owner

Understand the process of training, motivating and directing your team members.

Managing people

Steps to building and maintaining a strong, cohesive and effective team.

Building an effective team

Learn the tips to successfully manage a team in a remote environment.

Managing a remote team

Making remote and globally distributed teams work for you and your needs.

Working remotely

Best practices for running productive design critiques.

Running effective design critiques

Learn how to properly present your work and share ideas and opinions.

Presenting your work with impact

Tips on how to work and collaborate with designers.

Working with designers

Methods and models of exploring, deciding and delivering design.

Building a design process

Explore different generative and evaluative research techniques. User research synthesis and presentation.

Conducting good user research

Ways and resources to improve your design skills.

Improving design skills

Ways to provide constructive feedback to team members.

Giving effective feedback

How to think about design career paths and what progression looks like for designers?

Design career path

Lecturing and tutoring (preparing, delivering course content and marking) in Visual Communications, Design Thinking, Design Theory & Culture, User Experience and Web Design Technologies units, to over 200 undergraduate and master students.

Achievements:

::	Succeeded in helping students learned from the unit including having a high number of students finishing with high distinction.

::	Interacted with successful academics, researchers and tutors to develop content and tutorials for students.

::	Gained experience delivering lectures in both, face to face and online environments, to a 
a high-volume audience of over 230 students each time.

Clients: University of Sydney, Royal Australian Air Force, Tom Waterhouse, Ubicar, Global Prime, TAL Insurance, McMullin & Co, Co-Counsel, Sportsfluc and IOFS.

- Heading up the Design and Traffic department.

- Recruiting staff for creative departments and collaborating with other departments in the creation of engaging internal communications and conversion rates improvement.

- In 2016 I built a creative team overseas from scratch acquiring great experience in creative recruitment.

- Mentored and trained a whole team of designers overseas from junior to senior levels including a team leader to help manage daily traffic and ensure delivery runs smoothly.

Achievements:

::  Achieved  Head of Department role after 2 years.

::  Increased and encourage better communication within the Design team members by having team workshops, activities inside and outside work, personal goals follow-ups and team member support.

::  Improved overseas team’s traffic processes, created locally earlier, by maintaining strong and constant communication with their lead and ensuring designers follow the procedures having training to understand and get knowledge of the local industry and culture. 

- Developed creative processes to improve Production Traffic and relationships between stakeholders within the company and external such as SLAs procedures.

- Leading & mentoring the design team while overseeing all digital creative ensuring brand consistency and highly innovative output.

- Working along with multiple departments within the company including UX & Product Development in large Web, Mobile and App projects from concept to end. 

- Working with the Executive team on extremely confidential projects.	

- Managing daily traffic of jobs and resources within the marketing department and company.


Achievements:

::  Achieved Leading Role successfully after a year in the role.

::  Organising procedures within the Design Team and Marketing department which helped improving communication between departments ending in more accurate and faster delivery of assets.

::  Successful management of creative work reducing time of brief execution. Briefs were received and assessed immediately to ensure correct communication with designers followed by allocation and strong quality control before delivery of assets.

::  Creating and implementing new trafficking system and briefing strategy which improved the efficiency of briefs’ delivery and time allocation by 80%. This also helped improving communication and performance within the design team as allocation became clearer and faster. 

::  Build a new and successful team of designers from scratch in the middle of a rebranding, by recruiting each designer with no assistance and dedicating time to mentor and teach each one of them.

::  Delivered successful creative and team management over two big restructures of the company while working with extremely tight deadlines and under pressure by keeping calm and ensuring key organisation and time management.

::  Improved overseas team’s traffic processes, created locally earlier, by maintaining strong and constant communication with their lead and ensuring designers follow the procedures having the training to understand and get knowledge of the local industry and culture.

- Designing, developing and delivering weekly creative across a wide range of projects varying in size, complexity and technical platforms such as digital, print, social media, CRM, Media production, website and Affiliates, including flash, gifs, HTML banners, responsive coded HTML EDMs and website landing pages while managing CMS, updating content and weekly promotions for websites.

-  Designing, developing and maintaining websites based on HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP using WordPress and Joomla CMS. Working for renowned brands such as Howard’s Storage World, Freedom, Furniture One.

-  Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and graphic artwork.

-  Managing website migration projects to CMSs and QA testing for every website.

-  Designing and delivering weekly EDMs using CRM and Email Campaign Systems.

-  Creating, managing and editing brand promotional videos.

Achievements:

::  Exceeded expected results delivering complex projects for recognised retail brands by going above and beyond the client’s requirements such as delivering assets ahead of deadlines.

::  Reduced client complaints by creating and organising documentation to manage and improving their websites.

::  Implemented CRM software improving the company’s client’s database to a digital format.

::  Improved quality of existing websites by creating and implementing new designs and innovative functionalities.

-  Designing and implementing a website, Intranet and several microsites in flash, HTML and CSS.
-  Creating multimedia and graphic artwork for digital content, videos and all print material including the Hospital’s signage for internal and public spaces.

Achievements:

:: Improved usability & accessibility of the websites by reassessing the websites and keeping the www standards for accessibility. 

::  Created a new Design department which helped to improve all hospital communications within departments and a new very good resource for future projects.

::  Achieved big projects never developed before using a small budget, all achieved with very minimal assistance and resources. Examples of these projects are large-scale signage for the whole Air Force hospital that improved all pedestrian access to Hospital facilities and the production of videos for waiting rooms and intranet e-learning.

Catalina Millan🇦🇺

About Catalina Millan

Expertise

Sessions with Catalina Millan

What mentees say