Resume
Summary
• Seasoned professional - 13 Years of experience including 9 years (in-house) + 4.5 years (agency) + 2 years (independent consulting) + 2. 5 years (teaching) in parallel.
• Brands worked with – Walmart, Apple, Al Jazeera, Electronic Arts, Star Wars, Veteran’s Affairs etc.
• Types of work – Graphic design, art direction, typography, infographics, illustration, branding, UX+UI, advertising, social, video, motion graphics, 3D, print etc.
• Known for – Uplifting leadership, witty collaboration, solving complex challenges, eye-popping creative, always growing and being the sharpest dresser in the room.
Professional Experience
Walmart eCommerce, San Bruno: Art Director | Feb 2019 to present
Backbone of digital creative production for the brand’s online business. Lead the charge in high quality creative output and supporting business needs crucial to future brand success.
1. End-to-end Operational Excellence
• Establishing process – Established efficient team processes and service level agreements with cross-functional partners, ensuring seamless delivery of creative assets.
• Agency support – Managed communication and feedback with external creative agencies and vendors to maintain brand consistency.
2. Creative Direction
• Selling at scale – Walmart Digital Toy Catalogue – Led the production and coordination of approx. 12,000 assets (across 80+ pages depicting over 1000 unique products), generating $55 million in online revenue.
• Brand collaboration support – Provided strategic support (including project planning and capacity management) for product launches in collaboration with Apple, ensuring rapid turnarounds between announcements and availability.
3. Leadership & Mentorship
• Mentorship & training – Mentored and cultivated a diverse team of remote contractors, enhancing organizational service levels and brand perception.
• Problem solving – Fostered an agile problem-solving environment, advocating for upskilling and supporting team members. Challenges the team tackled included delivering a 2K asset business critical project in a tight timeframe during the holiday rush; maintaining the global illustration library for marketing; implementing and operationalizing rigorous quality control and standards to ensure video assets are high-quality and ADA compliant.
Walmart eCommerce, San Bruno: Senior Designer | Sep 2015 to Feb 2019
Led diverse design initiatives, conceptualizing and executing campaigns, new site experiences, and brand collateral to drive revenue, engagement, and sales growth on Walmart.com.
1. Impact
• Innovation – eCommerce Reimagined – Developed a novel solution in the eCommerce domain, later adopted as the foundation for the brand's current homepage through internal education and advocacy.
• Revenue generation – Gift Guide – Designed and launched a customized holiday gift guide on the Walmart website, resulting in a tenfold increase in revenue compared to the previous year's performance. Collaborated with 10+ teams including engineering, merchants, website, executive leadership.
2. New communication platform
• Walmart Content center – Led research, planning, UX, and final design for a new content hub at Walmart.com, facilitating deeper customer engagement beyond product offerings. Type of content included useful articles, how-to guides and recipes for lifestyle oriented and budget conscious customers.
• Featured content – Concepted and implemented design to highlight key articles from the Walmart content center on the landing page, driving increased site traffic through effective communication.
3. Making brand connections
• Creative problem solving – Conceptualized and crafted collector pins for the annual Walmart shareholder’s meeting, fostering connections among employees worldwide.
• PC Buying guide – Developed the first PC-buying guide for Walmart.com, overseeing the project from inception to implementation within a two-week timeframe.
4. Mentorship & Leadership
• Mentorship – Guided junior designers to deliver superior outcomes for internal clients at Walmart, fostering a culture of learning and collaboration.
• Creative hub – Led a weekly creative club to promote innovation, teamwork, and peer-to-peer collaboration among Walmart's creative team, staying ahead of emerging trends and technologies.
Miami Ad School, San Francisco: Teacher | Jul 2014 to Dec 2016
Classes taught: ‘Mobile Advertising’ and ‘Portfolio Development.’
· Taught advertising concepts and emphasized unified creative concepts for effective communication.
· Structured courses to facilitate significant improvements in students' creative abilities and fostered continuous improvement through feedback loops.
Freelance, San Francisco Bay Area: Art Director | Jan 2013 to Sep 2015
R2C Group, AJ+ (Al Jazeera), One World Communication, SideCar Agency & Heat (advertising)
• Emotional stages – Veteran’s Affairs – Designed typography-based illustrations for a Veteran’s Affairs project, visualizing the emotional stages of returning veterans for a downloadable guide aimed at aiding their transition to normalcy.
• Impact of current events – AJ+ – Produced mobile-friendly infographics for AJ+, enhancing news delivery with visual impact and insight, resulting in increased engagement and social influence.
• Responsive ‘parallax’ – DisplayPort – Developed a custom responsive website for DisplayPort, showcasing their adaptability using parallax design techniques and compelling visuals tailored to diverse user scenarios.
• Pitch work – 23andMe – Collaborated with agency creatives on pitch work for 23andMe, conceptualizing and designing diverse ideas across multiple platforms and media formats for the pitch deck.
Havas Worldwide, San Francisco: Jr. Art Director | May 2012 to Sep 2012
• Smart mobile ads – Combines existing functions of the smartphone and mobile web to create rich mobile advertising that would exemplify the various benefits of Stainmaster Carpets in fun and engaging ways.
• Humanized pharma – Injected creativity and humanness into the pharma world for Genentech by creating a people-centric web experience.
• Agency re-brand – Helped the Havas agency during its worldwide re-brand by working on the new website.
FCB, San Francisco: Jr. Art Director | May 2011 to Apr 2012
• Broad spectrum of work – Worked on a variety of project types for brands including Electronic Arts, Bioware, Lucas Arts, Star Wars, Dead Space 2, SIMS, PG&E and Taco Bell.
• Pitch work – Worked on multiple ad campaign pitches for the Star Wars brand for their Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) - ‘Star Wars: The Old Republic’.
Consulting
• Book cover design – Designed covers for a series of books on Hindu spirituality authored by a scholar from one of the most prestigious universities in India.
• Logo design – Designed and pitched logos for healthcare and science research industries.
• Web design – Provided consultation services, creative direction, design and implementation to create a website for a viral research laboratory.
Skills
I'm always learning and never tire of expanding my horizons in my quest to express my ideas in new and innovative ways.
• Creative direction – Holistic approach to creative challenges; insight-based concepts; impeccable art direction skills; expert color, typography and layout skills.
• Soft skills – Mentorship and ability to bring out the best in the team, eagle-eye project management capabilities, excellent command over language with superb communication skills.
• Software – Design, UX, 3D, Audio, Office
• Adobe – Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, After Effects, Premier Pro
• UX – Figma. Sketch
• 3D – Maxon Cinema 4D
• AI – MidJourney, Adobe Firefly, Chat GPT
• Audio – Audacity, Logic Pro X
• Office – Microsoft Office, Apple Keynote
Education
• Miami Ad School, San Francisco: Art Direction, Batch of 2010
• Karnataka Chitrakala Parishath, Bangalore: Bachelor's degree in Applied Art, Batch of 2008
Contact
• E-mail – kartiksekhar@gmail.com
• LinkedIn – www.linkedin.com/in/kartik-chandrasekhar
Resume in MS Word docx format