Overview
Nine delivered digital projects. Multiple industries. Teams distributed across five countries.
As Design Director at 3Lane Marketing, I connected discovery, research, creative direction, client relationships, and design quality throughout the delivery of digital experiences for American organizations.
Context
3Lane Marketing is a US-based agency working with organizations across sectors including education, healthcare, urban planning, manufacturing, environmental science, and public media.
My role involved directing design work within multidisciplinary, internationally distributed teams, while acting as a bridge between clients, project management, research, designers, developers, and quality assurance.
Across this engagement, I coordinated and delivered nine digital projects for organizations with distinct audiences, requirements, and operational challenges.
The Challenge
How do you maintain creative quality, strategic relevance, and implementation consistency across projects with very different goals and stakeholder expectations?
Each organization brought its own challenges, users, information structures, and constraints.
The responsibility was not simply to translate an initial brief into a visual solution, but to understand the underlying problem, challenge assumptions when necessary, and guide the team toward an appropriate outcome.
Strategy & Leadership
Discovery before design
I participated directly in client meetings, conducted qualitative interviews, and coordinated qualitative research activities.
Working with the project manager, I also contributed to quantitative discovery through surveys and questionnaires.
Research findings, stakeholder inputs, benchmarking, and professional experience informed the direction of each project.
AI-assisted research workflows
AI-assisted transcription and summarization helped process meeting and interview information, making it easier to organize findings and synthesize inputs for design decisions.
These tools supported analysis rather than replacing interpretation or professional judgment.
Creative direction and team guidance
I guided designers through verbal direction, visual references, and original sketches when needed.
I then reviewed their proposals, provided feedback, and directed refinements to maintain consistency with the project's objectives and creative direction.
Cross-functional collaboration
I worked with project management, developers, and QA professionals to keep project requirements, design decisions, and implementation aligned.
Design quality ownership
I monitored front-end implementation to ensure high visual fidelity between approved designs and delivered interfaces.
Client-facing leadership
I presented design deliverables to clients, explained the solutions, gathered feedback, and coordinated subsequent refinements.
Discovery remained adaptable throughout the process, allowing insights and new information to influence the direction of the work.
The Work
Nine coordinated and delivered digital projects:
-
MCLS — Midwest Collaborative for Library Services
Digital experience for a collaborative library services organization.
mcls.org (opens in a new tab) -
CPEX — Center for Planning Excellence
Digital communication for an organization focused on planning, communities, and sustainability.
cpex.org (opens in a new tab) -
FCC — Family Child Care Project
Digital experience supporting the family childcare sector.
ncfamilychildcare.org (opens in a new tab) -
Smart Growth America
Digital communication for an organization working on sustainable development, transportation, and land-use policies.
smartgrowthamerica.org (opens in a new tab) -
Northwest CT Manufacturing
Digital platform supporting a regional manufacturing sector partnership.
nwctmanufacturing.com (opens in a new tab) -
Northwest HealthConnect
Digital platform for a regional healthcare sector partnership.
nwcthealthconnect.com (opens in a new tab) -
MARCO — Mid-Atlantic Regional Council on the Ocean
Digital communication for regional ocean planning and cooperation.
midatlanticocean.org (opens in a new tab) -
MACAN — Mid-Atlantic Coastal Acidification Network
Digital experience for a collaborative network addressing coastal and ocean acidification.
midacan.org (opens in a new tab) -
Detroit PBS
Digital work for a public media organization.
detroitpbs.org (opens in a new tab)
My Role
Design Director
Responsible for creative direction, designer guidance, discovery activities, client presentations, interpretation of research findings, and visual quality assurance throughout the design-to-development process.
My work connected stakeholder expectations, user needs, design decisions, and technical execution.
Outcomes
- Nine coordinated and delivered digital projects for US organizations.
- Design collaboration across teams distributed in five countries.
- A consistent discovery-to-delivery approach adapted to different industries and organizational needs.
- Direct involvement in research, creative guidance, stakeholder communication, and implementation quality.
The diversity of these projects demonstrates an ability to apply a disciplined design process without imposing identical solutions on fundamentally different problems.
Leadership Principle
Understand the problem before designing the solution.
Good design leadership means questioning assumptions, making informed decisions, providing clear direction, and helping teams turn complexity into useful experiences.
Expertise
- Design Leadership
- Creative Direction
- UX Research
- Discovery
- Qualitative Research
- Quantitative Research
- Evidence-Informed Design
- Stakeholder Management
- AI-Assisted Research
- Cross-Functional Collaboration
- Design QA
- International Teams
- Digital Experience