Mitchel Tatafu

UX Designer

About Me

My Timeline

timeline timeline

Who Am I?

Starting from a very young age, when I wasn't getting into trouble for disassembling household electronics, I was illustrating characters in narrative rich scenarios. My innate drive to break things down and understand how they work and visually communicate those understandings drew me to a career in UX Design. From illustrator to animator to interface designer to interaction designer, my UX Design path has brought me a great deal of joy. But my thirst for improvement and expression is nowhere near satisfied.

The Mobile App and Game years

My career in the digital design world started during college as an animator with a mobile app and game development firm, where I developed my animation skills and beyond. During that time, I took on many design roles and worked on dozens of mobile apps and games.

Skills Acquired:

  • Adobe Illustrator
  • Adobe Photoshop
  • Adobe Premiere
  • Adobe After Effects
  • Autodesk Maya
  • HTML
  • CSS
  • Microsoft Outlook
  • Design Sprints
  • Prototyping
  • Presenting to Stakeholders
  • Developer Handoff

Back to University

Eventually, I gained a desire to understand the users of my designs more deeply, so I went back to University and earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Interaction Design.

Skills Acquired:

  • User Experience Design Methods
  • Cross Department Collaboration Experience
  • Sketch
  • Tumult Hype
  • Human Interface Design Principles
  • Designing for Virtual/Mixed Reality
  • 3D Interaction Design
  • Digital Publishing

Product Designer

After graduating, I landed a temporary position as a Product Designer for a large organization. Our task was to design, build, and maintain a complex design system and its accompanying patterns library, while transitioning several in-house design teams from their old systems and methods.

Skills Acquired:

  • Figma
  • Design System Integration
  • Design Patterns Documentation
  • Component Publishing Quality Control

Illustration

Here are a few of my illustration examples.

Vector Art

doomguy-n-daisy unarmored illustrated.
A digital publication cover page. Original was animated in Hype3—Mitchel Tatafu

Character Illustration

character illustration of a space marine
A character illustration—Mitchel Tatafu

Digital Painting

doomguy-n-daisy unarmored illustrated.
Digitally painted Tiki illustration—Mitchel Tatafu

An interactive VR experience

This is an interactive VR tour with a pseudo-AR interface. It is best viewed through a VR-Headset or a mobile device.