About me in 15 seconds

My name is Dakota Sumner.

I’ve been designing for 10 years, 5 of them professionally.
I love detailed Ui, solving complex problems, and smooth interactions.

I live in Huntington Beach, CA.
I’m married to my High School sweetheart
I just had my first child ~ my daughter, Winslow

Mantra I strive to live by ~ Strong opinions, loosely held

My path to being a designer

How I Got here

I was born and raised in Huntington Beach, California. My father was a professional skateboarder, and I was able to travel with him around the world at a young age.

I grew up surfing and skating, which I still do when I find the time. I was also homeschooled, so I was often teaching myself new skills and pursuing my curiosity.

How I started designing

When I was 14, my mom was owned a catering business and needed a website. After getting quotes for over $10k from agencies, I decided I would try my hand at building her website.

After long nights learning Square Space, youtube tutorials, and trial and error, I built a functional website for her business. This sparked my love of design and development.

how i got to where I am

Since then, I have spent the past 10 years designing. I've had the pleasure of working with a plethora of companies and projects, from contract to full~time.

I don’t have any institutional college experience, all my skills and knowledge have been self-taught from courses, youtube, and now Ai (Thank you GPT <3)

where I'm at now

I'm a product designer at allUP, helping build a better professional social network. allUP uses video testimonials to build people's profiles, which gives a better professional overview than a standard resume. You can see my profile here!

I'm also working on my own side apps, including Rollers, a Jiu Jitsu tracking app!

What I'm looking for

Looking ahead, I care deeply about solving problems that matter. I want to work with companies that value design and provide ownership to the team to solve problems.

Where I've worked

allUP

Social Network

2023 ~ Present

My current full time job is at allUP, where I am helping build a better professional social network. I am one of two designers on the team, and often work directly with our leadership to find improvements in our product and design new features. My contributions have helped raise multiple rounds of funding and provide major growth in our user base.

Finsync

Cash flow management tool

2022 ~ 2023

Finsync provides cashflow management tools and services for small businesses across America. I helped solve problems by talking to our users, collaborating with our team, and designing end to end flows in Figma.

I was involved in shipping numerous features including Collect Early™, Small Business Onboarding, a Mobile App Redesign, Improved Navigation layouts, Sending Invoices, and more.

I also created our Figma design system, which contained everything for web, mobile, and marketing.

Vizio

Consumer software & hardware

2021 ~ 2022

Vizio was a fortune 500 software and hardware company. I was a web designer during my time there. I made improvements to the website and provided front end support for launch. This included PDP pages, email marketing, landing pages, social media graphics, and brand refreshes.

Highline Media

Design Agency

2019 ~ 2021

This position was my first "real" design job. I was a web designer and developer at a local design agency in my home town of HB. I helped design sites for companies ranging from mom~and~pop shops, fitness companies, and large corporations. This role taught me a ton about working with clients, communicating well, and working quickly.

Freelance

Web, product, branding

2015 ~ Present

Over the years, I've been fortunate to work and contract for some amazing clients. This includes world renowned agencies like Iverson, to health care companies like Hoag Hospital. I offer services services like web design, branding, product design, and more.

Design principles

Strong opinions, loosely held. I believe when presenting designs, you must have an opinion, while not being married it.

Say, do, say. At the onset of every project, I say what I will do, then I do what I say, and finally, I will say what I did. Credits to Dan Mall for articulating this principle well.

Hifi designs are most valuable. Research is important, but believe getting to Hi-Fi & prototypes speeds up decision making. It’s hard to have an opinion on gray boxes.

Share > Surprise. I hate presenting surprises. I much rather share WIP snippets and Loom walk~throughs during the design processes.

Act like an owner. Every project I work on is treated with ownership. If something is worth doing, it’s worth doing well.

Define success early. Failing to do this results in a misaligned team and project. It could be a quantitive metric, or simply that “we need to reduce user churn”.

Tools I use

Figma

Jitter

HTML

CSS

hint of JavaScript

Webflow

Framer

+ Any tool you need me to learn