Brian Saunders

Principal Product Designer, Paylocity

June 2016–Present (Chicago, IL / Remote)

I’m a Principal Product Designer at Paylocity. Right now I’m leading the design for our next generation of mobile apps. This is a full stack project that involves extensive design systems work.

Previously I helped grow Paylocity’s Community product from around 20k MAU to over 1M MAU, created a new design system for a suite of video tools, designed a dashboard for helping companies understand and improve employee retention, designed a tool to calculate prorated and retro pay amounts, and devised an aggregated employee record experience. I also contributed components and documentation to Citrus, Paylocity’s internal design system.

Interaction Designer, Vokal

April 2014–February 2016 (Chicago, IL)

Vokal is a design agency in Chicago that focuses creating mobile apps, but most often I was asked to design flexible systems for products with Android, iOS, and web components. The tight timelines and design constraints necessitated that we work with design systems in order to apply a design language to apps on many platforms. Much of my work was around designing these systems, and figuring out how to make them work in the early days of design systems when not a lot of standards were established.

User Experience Designer, Maddock Douglas

2010–2014 (Elmhurst, IL)

Maddock Douglas was a creative agency that specialized in helping their clients identify market opportunities and see future trends before they happened. It was a great first job because I got to do a little bit of everything. Most of my work involved design and front-end prototyping to visualize product concepts for our clients. I also worked on a comprehensive design system for the Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Michigan retail and consumer portals.

BFA Visual Communications, Northern Illinois University

My design education was grounded in durable principles that helped me be an effective designer in any medium or tool.