My name is Zaur Aliyev and I’m a designer.

I consider myself a designer; but that doesn’t just mean I make things look pretty. Design is solving problems through iteration and developing a coherent solution focusing on the user and their experience. If you think that you can design in isolation, and come up with compelling UX design simply by thinking and talking it through, you probably aren’t a great designer, or at least not as good as you think.
Don’t forget: Good designers can rely on experience to a certain degree to arrive at the right design, but beware of designers that think they are always right – it’s a sure sign that they aren’t getting enough user and stakeholder feedback, and that their design solutions aren’t as good as they think.

Successfully implementing a design requires close collaboration with the engineering team, and you must have a high-level understanding of the software lifecycle. If users have to read FAQs to understand the service; that is big time FAIL!

Currently I am a Web Designer for Sunwing Travel Group located in Toronto. At Sunwing I design various forms of advertising from websites, flyers to apps. The process goes from a sketch to a wireframe to a mockup(s) to a prototype to the final product. Completely redesigning the Signature Vacations website from scratch gave me a chance work directly with the production team, IT(developer) team, marketing team, digital marketing team, copywriter, search engine optimizer, social media coordinator, web and graphic designers, project manager and even with the CEO. Working with all of these people helped me to make my designs as user oriented, user friendly, clean, and simple to use as possible.

I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m a bit of a geek when it comes to the latest technology. I am always researching better and more efficient ways of completing a task, and I love learning about new technology. I am excited about the advancements of things such as CSS3 & HTML5 and the new Apple products. As someone wiser than me once said, “Design is not just the way it looks but the way it works” this quote is why I love all Apple products and my future goal is to be a part of the Cupertino team.