Marcos Calatayud Designer

Career

  1. Designer

    I was one of the 4 designers at Qatium, An easy-to-use water management software for utilities of any size, with people distributed all over the world.

    Each area of the product had assigned a team with a designer, a water engineer, and some developers. These teams worked shoulder to shoulder, reaching agreements on how to develop each feature and pairing most of the time via video calls and screen-sharing.

    This way we could continuously deploy improvements that allowed us to gather feedback and iterate quickly.

    My main accomplishments were:

    • Accessibility: raise awareness on the topic and help to fully comply with WCAG 2.2 before June 2025.
    • GUI design: adopt an 8 point grid; prototype a light theme version of the app.
    • GUI engineering retrofit a responsive design versions to make the app fit in mobile devices; tokenize variables for easier development.

  2. Frontend developer

    The company needed a UI developer with a strong design sensibility.

    We worked in an agile fashion: with sprints, daily meetings, etc. The methodology was traditional but very effective: coding a hand-off design as truthful as possible.

    I built the HTML+CSS templates for several websites following a selection of good practices: it was semantic, accessibility friendly, responsive, made use of custom properties, etc.

    Projects

    • okmobility, an online car dealership.
    • Industrias Alegre, a company focused on making plastic parts for the automotive industry.
    • Email HTML + CSS coding.
    • Print-PDF layout made with HTML + CSS.

  3. Frontend Designer

    Happydonia had a good design foundation but were working without any designer.

    I joined to design new features and give the UI proper care, helping to establish best practices for new code and refactoring legacy code.

    This contributed to making a more polished user interface.

    Projects

    • happydonia, an employees internal communications and management tool.

  4. Frontend Designer

    The company was looking for a UI developer who translated the designs accurately and with care to the final products.

    Those included several webapps, emails, and print-ready PDFs for private wealth management.

    All of this was done suggesting good practices to make the teamwork consistent, easier and faster.

    Projects

    • Several private wealth management companies webapps.
    • Email HTML + CSS coding.
    • Print-PDF layout made with HTML + CSS.

  5. Designer and Frontend developer

    ninety nine wanted to develop an online broker that everyone could use.

    The team agreed on building an MVP to learn and iterate as soon as possible.

    I was involved in the end to end of the design process: analyzing the requirements, studying the competitors, defining the acceptance criteria, drawing workflows and wireframes, and building the UI.

    The most enjoyable part of the job was collaborating with the Compliance and Operations directors to reach a balance and build a comfortable product, mitigating the inconveniences of regulation (wait times, KYC, AML, etc).

    Projects

  6. Designer and Frontend developer

    Umanick provided biometric and ID verification for other businesses.

    When I joined, they were starting to build a new suite of software. However, I quickly realized that the scope of the project was too ambitious for the expected deadline. Thus I suggested putting off some parts and focusing on the essential ones. That way we could release a first viable version and then iterate.

    I drafted workflows and user interfaces to validate them with stakeholders before coding the views in FXML (JavaFX) and CSS. To help keep a consistent interface, I also built a style guide and an icon family for the software.

    Projects

  7. Designer & Frontend developer

    Rankia was the leading financial community in Spain. After years of exponential growth it faced some major challenges: lack of maintenance and consistency in both design and front-end code; and lack of responsive versions (in 2016).

    My focus was set on:

    • Auditing the current visual design and detecting its major flaws.
    • Leading the creation of a style-guide for design and front-end code.
    • Setting up several improvements in the front-end development pipeline.

    As a result:

    • We gave consistency and coherence to the visual design.
    • We began to deploy responsive versions of the site.
    • We improved the performance of the site by reducing the requests of files and the total download size.

    Projects

    • Rankia, an online community around economic and finantial information.
    • Verema, an online community about the world of wine.

  8. Designer & Frontend developer

    Aureka managed the biggest community around learning online poker.

    My role as a UX designer and front-end developer covered many different areas where I had to coordinate with stakeholders and developers: from early sketching to pre-production prototypes; from desktop only to responsive design; from landing pages to newsletters; from R&D to production design and code; from performance audits to copywriting.

    The products provided a comfortable design, excellent performance, and progressive enhancement features; such as responsive web design and native video (instead of using Flash).

    Projects

    • EducaPoker (including unreleased iterations).
    • Poker-Red (several iterations).
    • Drupal Admin Interfaces.
    • Several other inactive sites.

  9. Frontend developer

    During my Master in Multimedia Development I started working at a professor's agency as a front-end developer. Here I started to share with my co-workers the importance of accessibility, semantic markup, microformats and compatibility (oh, good old IE6 days...).

    Projects

    • Many different projects with XHTML and CSS2.1, but the Internet updates fast and now all those sites are either updated or down.

  10. Proof reader

    I got the opportunity to work where the dreams are built. Although it was a job not related to design, I learnt a lot about many topics by being part of a multinational team in a multinational company, where I ensured that the games were properly translated into Spanish.

    Projects