I am an art director, team leader, and graphic designer with fourteen years experience working in both agency and in-house teams, based in Toronto.
Currently, I lead a growing cross-functional team of designers and developers at
I am also a founding partner in Auctor Design, a design collective based in Toronto.
Info-Tech Research Group’s core service commitment is to provide you with best-practice
The Info-Tech Research Group website is a content-driven Software-as-a-Service platform. The blueprints pages are the core of the Info-Tech website, the most highly trafficked pages, and where the bulk of the content of the site lives. Although the content is updated regularly, the blueprint template had not received any significant updates, design or otherwise, in several years. Years of technical debt had accumulated and much of the content was stored in PowerPoint format and not surfaced on the page itself. Engagement, SEO ranking, and conversion had been slipping for some time. An update to bring the blueprint pages into a more modern design was seen as a high priority but monumental effort that could only be achieved iteratively.
Using a wide variety of user experience and behaviour tracking analytics from sources such as Google Analytics, Hotjar, Lighthouse, and Gainsight, I began analyzing the design and layout of the page.
Above: The original version of the Blueprint Page Design
One of the first changes made was improving the typography. The typography in the old design did not scale well to the very large or small screen resolutions on modern devices. The typographic hierarchy also needed work, and I put considerable effort into establishing a baseline and rhythm. Additionally, a hero image was used in the background of a title banner, however, the image was small and obscured by the type, and the banner format also pushed the rest of the content further down the screen. Switching the design to a 75%/25% layout kept the main content column to a more readable line length and allowed us to highlight authors, contributors, and other informational material in the sidebar.
Above: Testing surfacing the entire registration form to users up front
Live A/B user testing began on the content lock at the top of the screen, as I oversaw multiple designers making iterative changes to it under the hypothesis that the locked content banner was hostile and off-putting. Experimenting with everything from colour, to language, to the number of fields, and size and placement, we eventually settled on a significant change. Whereas the old banner featured a yellow and black design with a photo of a lock and the all-caps headline “THIS RESEARCH IS FOR MEMBERS ONLY,” the new iterations gradually moved towards our corporate blue with the friendlier message “Get Instant Access Now.”
Above: The original Locked Content Bar
Below: Current iteration of the Locked Content Bar
Videos had previously just been inserted mid-page, which failed to emphasize how important the video content was, as such were under-utilized by users. In the new design, the videos were moved to the very top of the right side of the page, in keeping with their importance. The videos, if present, would replace the hero image and instead use the hero image as the video thumbnail, so as to maintain a striking visual at the top of the page.
Similarly, member ratings had been buried at the bottom of the page. These were surfaced directly below the hero image or video, and redesigned to emphasize key metrics including the Overall Impact Rating, Average Dollars Saved by Implementation, and Average Days Saved by Implementation.
Concurrently with all the visual changes, I began developing a process to liberate the content stored in PowerPoint decks and surface it on the page, with the goals of increasing SEO and content syndication. To avoid surfacing the entirety of the research to non-paying members, a competitive analysis of content paywalls was undertaken.
SEO Schema was also introduced into the page, including paywall content schema, video schema, and breadcrumb schema.
Core Web Vitals were extremely low and needed to be brought up to snuff. Due to the legacy tech debt, this proved to be one of the most difficult tasks and one that we continue to iterate upon to this day.
Above: The newly created content lock at the bottom of the page
Such a massive overhaul to a key area of the website was met with no small amount of resistance. Although the pages were near universally recognized as needing an update, the smallest change could affect the day to day process of any number of departments. Sales teams and research analysts were quick to vocalize their displeasure with anything that they perceived as having a negative impact on their own process, so engaging those teams as allies and inviting them into the process became key. As we neared the initial launch date, I ran numerous training sessions with each team and addressed their questions and concerns.
Given the sheer volume of changes to the blueprint pages, as well as the amount of blueprints themselves that would be changing, and the fact that many of the blueprint page components are used through legacy areas of the website, it was inevitable that we would break something. Thankfully, most of our oversights were limited to visual bugs on edge cases such as deprecated content.
Within two weeks of launching our new design, user engagement reached a new high. Time on page for all blueprints increased by 40%, and nearly doubled for those where the content previously stored in PowerPoint had been surfaced. Downloads of the PowerPoint decks, a key metric of concern given that we were now surfacing this content on page, also saw a slight uptick.
SEO rankings across the board went from an average position of ~50 to ~20 and continue to climb as we make incremental improvements. Along with this, organic traffic to the blueprint pages increased by 129% and unlocks increased by 62%. The bounce rate on the pages also dropped by 47%.
After a few iterations of adjusting the content formatting and schema, we were also able to achieve syndication through Google News, and are now working to increase our visibility in that platform, with an aim of making it a significant source of future prospects.
Brian Walker
We involve. We compel action. We drive measurable results. Our products interact with
Info-Tech Research Group’s design principles and guidleines had never been comprehensively catalogued. As the design team, and company as a whole, began experiencing rapid growth, it became imperative that we begin the process of documenting and standardizing our styles across the product suite in order to be able to onboard new designers and more effectively evangelize for design within the wider organization.
Leading a small team of designers, I began the process of building an interactive web-based catalogue to serve as the basis of our design system.
Above: Screen capture of the Branding section of the ITRG Design System
Using Brad Frost's open source Style Guide Guide as a starting point, we set about modifying the design to better convey our vision.
Above: Screen capture of the Color section of the ITRG Design System
Not having much dedicated time for the project, the team and I worked the project in as "the water between the marbles," until we were able to deliver a proof-of-concept in order to get buy-in from senior management.
Above: Screen capture of the Quick Guide Videos section of the ITRG Design System, detailing important code implementation details
Since we're always trying to raise the bar for our product design, the moment we would write down a rule or guideline, it would inevitably change. This made keeping a perfectly up-to-date document nearly impossible without a dedicated team. We decided that moving forward we would focus more on patterns and componentization that could be managed in Figma and automatically updated elsewhere.
Still, the system remains in place as a quick reference guide for users across the company.
Having a comprehensive written standard of our design goals helped to elevate morale within the design team, as they were now able to quickly reference standards rather than trying to dig up relevant examples from the archive. Additionally, the tool proved useful for elevating design throughout the company, as members of other teams such as sales, research, and development now had a definitive set of guidelines to follow.
As soon as it was launched, we began work on phase two, building a comprehensive pattern library and componentizing legacy code. This work remains an ongoing effort as we strive to constantly raise the bar.
Brian Walker
Online policy management and administration software to help streamline the creation, approval, distribution, and monitoring of corporate policies, procedures, and forms. Stop letting poor policy management put your organization at risk. Restore order to your policy library with a centralized repository system that will save you time, improve compliance, and reduce the probability of regulatory penalties.
myPolicies is a new product offering from Info-Tech Research Group, a Software-as-a-Service package for managing corporate documents, which first launched in 2016. I have been involved in almost every stage of building myPolicies since the early conception phase. I designed the logo, built the first iteration of the brand style guide, worked on the design and front-end development of the software itself, and art directed the marketing site and second iteration of the brand style guide.
myPolicies is set up as a separate instance for each client organization. There are two major types of users; administrators and employees. Administrators oversee the creation and assignment of corporate policies and documents. Employees receive email notifications when a policy is updated or a new policy is assigned to them, and they are able to log in, read the policy, and acknowledge it. There is a full user dashboard so that employees can see all the policies in their profile, and they are also able to download all policies as PDFs. The administrator dashboard is far more advanced, with policy creation and editing tools, user management, analytics features, and more.
Overwhelmingly, most users of myPolicies fall into the employee user type. This means that their goal is to log in, read, and acknowledge their policies as quickly as possible so they can get back to work. This meant prioritizing the dashboard toward an outcome I had not previously designed for: getting the users to leave the software quickly but successfully. There was a lot to learn here about making actions limited and incredibly obvious, and almost forcing the user down a specific path.
myPolicies launched successfully and continues to grow year over year, becoming an important revenue source for Info-Tech Research Group. We continue to invest in the platform, making regular improvements to both our marketing efforts and the software itself.
Brian Walker
These are stories of corruption from around the world. They involve bribery, fraud, money laundering, murder, extortion, drug trafficking, shady leaders, unethical governments, suspicious deaths, and a lot more. A partnership between The Walrus and the Global Reporting Centre.
The Walrus and the Global Reporting Centre teamed up to produce a series of investigative journalism pieces targeting corruption around the world. The series was a hit, and The Walrus approached Auctor Design about turning it into a book.
This was a project I was extremely proud to be a part of. I worked on the page designs and typographic layouts, and helped choose photography. Three days before we went to press, the client decided they were so happy with the design, that they wanted us to illustrate the book instead of using photographs, and so I handled four of the eight interior illustrations.
Once the client had asked for illustrations, we absolutely should have pushed the print date out. Turning around the illustrations on such a tight timeline, with no notice ahead of time, left us little time to co-ordinate. To top things off, while our team is used to working in close proximity, we all happened to be in different cities when the ask came through. We definitely could have co-ordinated a bit better, which would have led to more cohesive illustrations.
The client was extremely pleased with our rapid turnaround as well as the final look of the book, and has continued to hire Auctor for more work.
Bell Lifestyle Products is a Canadian nutritional supplements manufacturer that offers a wide range of products covering areas as arthritis and joint pain, digestive health, stress relief, and more. The Bell Academy is an online Learning Management System for educating retailers on how best to take advantage of Bell's wide array of product offerings.
Bell was looking for a way to educate retail staff on how to recommend the best products for optimal health outcomes, as well as incentivize retailers towards stocking and recommending Bell products. I worked to conceptualize, design, and deliver an online learning management system and promotional marketing campaign to onboard retailers into the system. I worked on both the early conceptualization and design phases, as well as the entire development phase of the Academy.
From early on in the conceptualization phase, I knew that I would be solely responsible for both the front and back-end development of the system, and I also knew that we couldn't pitch anything I couldn't build (or learn to build). To that end, from the moment we settled on what we wanted to pitch, I started researching systems I could leverage. I settled on ExpressionEngine, which I already had experience working with, backed up by a professional LMS add-on that seemed highly customizable. Long before the development phase started, I was spending nights taking advanced PHP and JavaScript classes to ensure I could complete the project within budget and timeline.
From a design perspective, more wireframing user journey mapping went into this project than anything I had done previously. There was a lot of complex member management issues to work out, and things that had been simple in previous projects such as user registration were complicated by the requirement of integration with the client's CRM system to only allow existing clients to register.
Scope creep and communication were massive issues on this project, with the agency allowing the client to change requirements almost daily. This led to a lot of quick learning on my part, as I scrambled to design and code new features and functionality that we hadn't discussed or planned for. It was by far one of the messiest projects I have ever worked on, and it turned out to be a phenomenal learning experience for designing and coding complex systems, as well as setting realistic expectations with stakeholders.
The Bell Academy launched on time and in budget, and we continued to add features to it for some time after. The Academy was a smashing success, helping to increase both the number of retailers stocking Bell's products, as well as the amount of product stocked by retailers who used the Academy.
Blade Creative Branding
Stakeholder management is a critical aspect of running a successful IT department.
The CIO Business Vision IT Satisfaction Scorecard is Info-Tech's most popular product. In 2018, I was tasked with launching a project to completely rethink and redesign the scorecard from the ground up. Working directly with the VP of Product & Innovation, I conceptualized a radical overhaul of the scorecard, streamlining the visuals while emphasizing the key data points and maintaining what clients already loved about the existing product.
The scorecard is a data-driven report, designed to be printed at tabloid page size. The visuals are rendered in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and run through a series of transforms that eventually delivers a print-ready PDF to the end-user. It contains a minimum of 12 unique pages, each with the ability to repeat individual sections and spin-off whole new pages based on the client's dataset, ensuring each client receives a completely personalized report that nonetheless has a consistency of design and a high level of polish.
One of the key goals of the redesign was for a client to be able to glance at any page in the report and instantly have an idea of how well they are doing in that business area.
The limits of HTML to PDF conversion are always at the forefront when we design these reports. For this report, we tried our absolute best to put those limits out of our minds and stick to the mantra "Design an extraordinary report, and we'll figure out how to build it later." The approach definitely led us to create a product that stood head and shoulders above previous products in this category. In the development phase, we were required to be extremely thoughtful in working around the limitations of the technology, and this definitely slowed development down a bit. In the end, we all agreed it was worth it to build a superior product. That said, we definitely had to pick our battles, and an exciting new feature from our initial pitch was left on the cutting room floor in order to make time to implement all the other improvements.
The CIO Business Vision update became a key sales piece for Info-Tech after it launched, and its enhanced visuals set a new bar for the look of Info-Tech's reporting products. Newer products continue to build on the standard it set. The product is more popular than ever, and we have received numerous compliments from long-time clients on the improvements.
Brian Walker