Jennifer Randall
Design Lead Bio
Jennifer Randall, a Design Lead for Knowledge Strategies Group (KSG), is a strong designer who uses composition and color to infuse her designs with impact. She is skilled in working with clients to understand the creative vision and cultivate a strategic message. She leads KSG creative teams in assuring the client’s vision is realized in the output of her team’s designs.
Jennifer has been designing websites since the web was in its infancy, starting in 1995. She has watched the climate of web design change from straight information dissemination to decoration of "brochureware" to the radical shift of online applications and highly functional e-commerce sites. She aims to lead her team in striking a balance in functionality and design while ultimately providing value for her clients.
Jennifer standardized and wrote the design processes for Knowledge Strategies Group, ranging from a formal methodology, filenaming, directory structures, and comp production. She authored the KSG Design Lead's manual including topics such as steps in leading the design process, the creative brief, the style guide, timelines and budgets. She also contributed to writing the Image Processing manual.
Jennifer has been a professional consultant for five years. Some of the clients on her roster, while at Knowledge Strategies Group, include:
Rampage clothing,
Gold Toe & Nautica socks,
Arrow shirts,
MyMaison home furnishings,
LooknBuy european products.
Upon her arrival at Knowledge Strategies Group, Jennifer found online design solutions for the following:
The National Science Foundation
The White House
Compuware Corporation
Professional Golfers’ Association
Mitsubishi
NBC Television
Homicide, the tv show
Saturday Night Live
and various BMG music sites.
Jennifer has had the advantage of working with such clients as Rampage, MyMaison, Looknbuy and The Trend Report at the start of their online ventures, allowing her and the Knowledge Strategies Group team to grow with their clients from the ground level up.
On the Rampage clothing website, Jennifer was responsible for leading a team of designers and sitebuilders during a rigorous hard launch process. She created many of the sublevel interfaces, and worked closely with her team to produce a strategic information architecture solution which compelled users to explore and buy the clothing products in a unique way. She created and designed the idea of an interactive product area where pieces of clothing were mixed and matched by simply sliding top and bottom screens to coordinate outfits.
On the MyMaison home furnishings site, she led a team of designers and front-end sitebuilders through a demo launch, a soft launch, and another rigorous hard launch. She brought her enthusiasm for interior design into the design process, and pushed her team to offer the most creative solutions for shopping online while under tight deadlines.
While in Milan, for a Looknbuy soft launch, she was able to work with the client to discover strategic user needs at every level in the design-to-buy process. She worked with her design team in the U.S. to offer a functional design solution, for a highly technological-based company, again under rapid deadlines.
Jennifer designed three totally unique solutions for the home page of Saturday Night Live, all of which were implemented in succession.
At the National Science Foundation, she was responsible for designing the first website to be federal government classified as an official electronic document. The National Science Foundation is an arm of the federal government where most of the Internet was developed, among other technological and educational advancements. She worked in the Directorate for Education and Human Resources where Mark Andresson, the founder of Netscape, received funding to implement the world’s first web browser, Mosaic.
For the White House and the National Science Foundation, she came up with high-impact designs which satisfied diverse user-base needs as well as broke design perceptions for federal government sites being designed at the time.
employment history
1. 1999-2000 Knowledge Strategies Group, Lead Design Consultant
2. 1998-1999 Freelance Web Designer (including work for the Los Angeles branch of USWeb/CKS)
3. 1996-1998 Compuware Corporation, New Media Design Consultant
4. 1995-1996 The Multimedia Center, Web Publishing Specialist
5.
education
Bachelor of Arts Degree in Art, specialization in Visual Communications, The Maryland College of Art and Design, on hold (4.0 GPA, Dean's List).
Bachelor of Arts Degree in Journalism, specialization in Broadcast Journalism and English, The University of Maryland at College Park, May 1995.