Thomas Collins

I joined the OpenMindAI team at the beginning of 2024 and what a whirlwind it’s been. A remote US based Education Tech company focused on creating an innovative platform around college applications for students and parents, and bringing in an AI guide with for a whole new experience for this demographic. Launching them with an entirely bespoke design system, product flow, and some fresh new visual styles to shake up the college scene of the US.

From product design of our full application, bringing the charm and style of ‘Alice’, our AI to life in visual and communicative form, branding from the ground up, marketing, illustration, animation, you’ll find a pretty good representation of all I can do here.

Fully in my element.

My time at Solarflare, a technology focused creative agency in the UK, was spent as Lead Integrated Designer; producing design work for high-impact, innovative tech led experiences, while also creating pitch presentation decks to win clients – like Wimbledon, UEFA, LEGO, ASICS and more – our marketing assets across the board, and design processes and guidance to help facilitate great work in others.

Reporting directly to the CEOs, my core responsibilities were to enable design success throughout the business – delivering top quality pitches for never-seen-before global activations to our clients, pushing the boundaries of my tech knowledge with constant research into immersive and new developments, and how we liked to put it, hacking the human experience.

Working closely with the founders, I was also responsible for helping create the ways the fully-remote team of engineers and devs collaborate and communicate as a team to design effectively at scale and across timezones.
Here I pushed my leadership capacity, not just as a designer, but a product and project manager. With my own team of designers and developers to closely manage, as well as plenty of freelancers for all of the niche projects we’d work on, it was truly an agnostic team that created some incredibly unique moments.

Through my own business I have designed & developed applications for B2C & B2B, business products and experiential service activations, helping business’ navigate tricky re-designs to their core products and providing some smashing from-scratch ideas when it comes to solving UX and UI challenges.

I evolved Sharecare Health’s existing Eat Right Now behavioural app onboarding process and in-app experiences like their Habit Mapper and Lightening tool to be a far friendlier yet imaginative flow and overall sign-up boosting. Provided Brainspark Games EdTech studio with a whole new game UX & UI, character and world building and design system, for their best selling educational platform, to give it a much needed spark. Gave the Emirates group an AI-fueled activation that allowed customers to generate their own premium ‘Emirates Experience’ art that took over ITB Berlin 2024. Provided an full revamp of software systems for Utilidex Energy across their business enterprise & client to consumer products to bring it up to speed with modern practice.

And that’s just a snippet of the last few years of designing…

What started out as a midweight role here rocketed up pretty swiftly into leading the digital front at Once, the full service entertainment powerhouse, during that whole ‘locked indoors’ moment of the world.

I started out with online advertising for the likes of Warner, Netflix, Universal, etc. but giving it some animated flare, as well as out of home print in major spaces. Did a badass AR Filter for Iron Maiden. I then begun leading the digital marketing campaigns of Pokémon in the UK and EMEA, launching some pretty awesome online activations and web-based games, then hit my big shot.

What initially started as co-directing and designing the pitch and launch campaign for the entire UK and EMEA of Disney+, for almost two years I led all seasonal and individual titles and campaigns for the platform. From Marvel & Pixar campaigns, the launch of Star, to working on digital, media/animation and OOH for Mandalorian, Onward and Mulan, and plenty more.

I had the privilege of really growing not only my design capabilities in a range of software from animation to augmented reality, learning from some incredible leaders in the space, but also took my confidence in presenting and pitching with high-performing clients to a whole new level.