Hi I'm Josh Holloran, a in Portland, Oregon.
Product Designer
Design Director
UI/UX Specialist
Visual Brand Designer
Static Website Developer
Native iOS & Android Designer
Web App Designer
Copywriter
About
Hi there, I'm Josh. I help build and grow businesses that prioritize design. I’m a multidisciplinary designer, meaning I design anything and everything needed to launch a digital product or business. I take a holistic approach to product design, crafting all the interconnected pieces necessary to build and promote a great user experience—brand and visual identity, user interface, iconography, illustrations, marketing website, etc. I also enjoy building and managing design teams.
MY STORY
During my time as an aerospace engineering student, continuing beyond my eventual degree in Music, I constantly found myself building terrible websites and designing cringe-worthy logos for my friends, their bands, and their Uncle Henry’s landscaping business.
The quest to design less terrible things eventually led me to abandon my rockets and hang up the keytar.
Turns out I have a knack for designing digital products as well as building and managing the teams that make them successful.
I currently lead product design efforts at Cross River. The bank recently acquired Seed, the YCombinator startup I was previously part of.
In addition to Cross River, I run O’H Design Co.—my one-man-shop for contract work with startups, small businesses, agencies, and Uncle Henrys.
If I had to choose a single design discipline to hang my hat on, I'd claim user experience as my area of expertise. I use design to solve business problems and realize business opportunities. I turn complex ideas into simple and familiar tools. It’s been my experience that great design doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It's a collaborative process of applying skill to a researched hunch, then rapidly adjusting that hunch based on early and frequent feedback from real customers and stake-holders.
Have a project, question, or just want to say hello? Get in touch.
EXPERIENCE
Cross River
I led product design efforts at Cross River, where I created a new design language and component libraries to design consistent banking products across the company.
Among these products was a responsive web app for small business loans. Referencing an old process that used email, PDFs, and spreadsheets, I designed an app for businesses to apply for (and admins to underwrite) small business loans. In just 3 months, we had $14M in the pipeline and saw a 75% reduction in time to process/fund an application.
I also had the priviledge of building a design team and working on a variety of other business banking products—prioritizing design systems thinking, UX, and visual design.
Seed Acquired
I led design efforts for the YCombinator graduate, Seed, whose goal was to bring business banking into the modern era, making it easy to do things like open an account online, pay bills, get paid, and use a banking website and mobile app that don't make you want to pull your hair out. Designing a new kind of bank and building a team to support it was quite an adventure. We were acquired by Cross River Bank and are now on a mission to continue building the world's best banking software.
Meridian Apps Acquired
I helped build Portland startup Meridian Apps from the ground up. I designed the brand, mobile & web user interfaces, and built the marketing website. We were acquired by Aruba Networks, subsequently acquired by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. I recruited and managed a team of product designers. We worked to improve design on a variety of platforms for all Aruba Networks software products.
Papercloud
In this longterm contract role, I collaborated with Australian agency, Papercloud, to develop design languages, create brands, and provide creative direction on native & web apps, as well as large-scale digital branding campaigns.
Home Advisor
This Colorado-based tech startup afforded me the opportunity to manage my first design team of UX, marketing, and print designers. It was also my first foray into intensely data-driven design and conversion-centric UX.