I'm Stephen Bau. I am a designer based in Vancouver, Canada. I am building on 30 years of experience as a designer to combine empathy, creativity and technical proficiency as a full stack developer and UX designer.
Since August of 2018, I have been working as a mentor to help people who are actively seeking a shift in their careers as they learn user experience design. Through UX Academy, Designlab is training the next generation of designers.
I bring human-centred design thinking to create engaging experiences through brand design, web development, and digital product design.
I have been working as a designer since 1988. Since the early 2000s, I have been responsible for assessing and choosing technologies, setting up servers, gathering content inventories, developing content strategies, building information architecture, creating wireframes, high-fidelity mockups, interactive prototypes, setting up version control for development and production repositories, and deploying finished websites. I have worked as a freelance designer, as an in-house designer for a non-profit organization, as a member of design studio and web agency teams, and as a business owner collaborating with other independent contractors.
I also have a particular interest in the Bauhaus, not only because the school is credited as the inspiration for clean, modern design, but also because they were committed to building a community to make a difference in the world. Their approach to modern life focused on a synthesis of art and technology, where an understanding of materials and production methods was essential to the creative process. I approach design and development with a similar philosophy of developing an understanding of technology and how people interact with various media in order to best create designs that effectively meet the needs of these users and audiences.
My experience as a designer includes various aspects of the design and development process, from a firm grasp of design and typographic principles, to brand design, art direction, content strategy, information architecture, user experience design, wireframing, mockups, prototyping, templating, XML, XSLT, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, Rails, Node, web typography and webfonts, front end development frameworks, tools and preprocessors, version control (Git), data modeling, design integration with applications and content management systems, and user testing.