Enterprise Cloud Design at Nutanix
I arrived at Nutanix in 2013 as the first product designer. Nutanix was a startup with 200 employees and 2 key products.
In June 2020 when I left the company, the design team had grown to 50 people in 3 geographical locations, while Nutanix had grown to a IPO’d company with 7000 employees.
The design foundations I set up in 2013 for myself and the company were fundamental to the growth of the team and the company and are still used today by the entire design team. During my stay at Nutanix I also contributed to the delivery of top quality designs, like a design system, but also fully participated and led the growth of the team, design processes and tools.
Please find the following key contributions I’ve made at Nutanix. I am happy to share more in-depth information about individual projects over the phone or through a presentation.
2013-2015
Product Design Foundation & Redesign
Link: salleedesign.com/work/nutanix-foundation
Role: Design, HTML/CSS/JS
Description: My first task when I joined Nutanix, as the sole designer, was to lay out solid foundations for the years to come, and in the process completely redesign their products. I created the design foundations, philosophy and rules that are still in use 7 years later: typography, iconography, colors, design direction and product design philosophy. I also worked tightly with the front end engineers in order to improve our pixel perfect HTML/CSS implementation and adopted a preprocessing CSS language, LESS.
2013-2020
Nutanix Design System
Link: nutanix.design/system/
Role: Design, Design Lead, Design Manager, HTML/CSS/JS
Description: In the span of 7 years I created and participated in the creation of 3 Design Systems at Nutanix. The first two were design guides rather than full design systems. In 2016 our team of 3 designers created the first official Nutanix Design System. This resulted in the creation of the nutanix.design consumer website and the adoption of a consistent look and feel by all the designers within our cross geographical team. We then continued iterations on the System based on designer feedback and needs.
We also, in parallel, worked tightly with the engineering team in order to create a full React.js library from the Design System components.
2018-2020
Nutanix Illustration Team & Asset Library
Link: nutanix.design/illustrations/
Role: UI Design, Design Lead, Design Manager, Artistic Director, HTML/CSS/JS
Description: For my first 5 years at Nutanix we never had any illustrators on the team. We’ve had a few individual contributors with some illustration skills, but there was never a unified effort to create illustrations for our Nutanix products. In a year and a half, I pitched, hired and managed an illustration team. This resulted in the creation of a 4 person team, an illustration system and a tighter collaboration with the marketing team. We also released in 2020 our Illustration Asset Library, which allows any user to browse and download any illustration we have built in both our product and marketing palettes.
2013-2020
Team Building, Leadership & Management
Description: I was instrumental in building the Nutanix design team and its processes. I hired many designers, worked with agencies, and managed many freelancers. I also fully participated in tweaking and improving our many design processes, like a UX gate or a Fit and Finish gate.
September 2016
Nutanix Mobile Design
Role: Project Lead
Description: In September 2016 we wanted to prototype our first mobile application. Lacking in-house designers we decided to hire a design agency. I acted as the single point of contact with the Clay design agency, reaching out to them and acting as the Project Manager and Creative Director during the whole project. I defined the requirements of the app and approved the screen designs.
2014-2015
Nutanix.com Redesign
Link: nutanix.com
Role: Early design concepts, design lead, HTML/CSS/JS
Description: In early 2014 I helped Nutanix to launch a new marketing website. The foundations used at the time are still present on the website today. Nutanix.com being a CMS (Wordpress), I designed the main concepts and pages of the site: page layout options, responsiveness, typography, colors and also the main product pages, blog pages, blog posts and company pages. In order to help me with the amount of work I led 2 other designers. Once we were happy with the overall concepts, I then proceeded to build a fully workable prototype with a front end freelancer. This prototype was then handed to a design agency in order to integrate the code in Wordpress.
2013-2020
Nutanix Extra Projects
Links: nutanixbible.com, nutanix.design.v2
Role: Design, Design Lead, Design Manager, HTML/CSS/JS
Description: Here are a few extra projects worth showing. In order: the Nutanix Bible, a new version of nutanix.design (never released) and Nutanix Soft font creation.
