Olá,
My name is Eduardo Tanaka. Designer, hobby illustrator, acoustic guitar dabbler, Brazilian of Japanese descent, late Gen X internet relic.
I’ve been around long enough to see my craft change a lot of times, back in the day I used to present myself as Graphic Designer, Layout Artist, then Webdesigner, Information Architect, Interface Designer, then UI, UX, Product Designer and, well, most recently as Design Manager, Project Lead, etc. But that’s the thing, trendy names change all the time, so I prefer to stick to the basic and timeless, and consider myself a good old “general purpose” designer.
In these 20-something years of my career, I had the opportunity to work in all phases of a project, from client-facing prospecting, discovery and research processes, facilitating workshops, putting Information Architecture together, creating vision boards, layout proposals, design libraries, up to handoff for development and further Design QA, metrics follow-up, user testing, etc.
I had contact with multiple industries, working with both entertainment and educational Games, as well as in HealthTech, FinTech, Retail (Desktop, Mobile, and POS), logistics, e-commerce, and even exotic IoT exploration projects.
As a designer, my craft is about form and function.
Sometimes the design solution is a screen layout, sometimes a diagram, or a user flow, or maybe even just text or an illustration. Sometimes it will be highly conceptual, sometimes it will be as pragmatic as adjusting things directly on code. And so it goes.
Over the most recent ~5 years, I’ve been exploring the management path. Leading teams from different sizes and skill sets, in both consulting and enterprise design fronts, running the resourcing and allocation processes, performance reviews, mentoring, and putting together guidelines and occasional talks to help both junior and experienced designers get most out of their talents and potential.
Ever since I started this part of the journey, I progressively thought more and more about the process of building (hiring, developing) and growing teams as a design project in itself.
Anyways…
Some of the most exciting projects I have worked on are under (some level of) publication restriction, either by contractual obligation or because they are/were internal tools of the respective clients. This is why I chose not to have a public portfolio. NDAs, amirite…?
Invite me for a coffee, and I can show you the projects and the stories!
In the meantime, you can contact me via LinkedIn, or find me posting cat pictures on Mastodon.
See you around!
