Tom Quigley
Design-led creative practicioner working across brand, product & scalable digital systems.
Evolving SWDS into a more personal, human-centered experience for MySmithsonian.
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Design Systems, Brand Evolution, User Interface, Prototyping
2026
Repairing design debt and rebuilding confidence through process, honesty, and a systems-first approach.
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Heuristic Audit, Design System, User Experience, User Interface, Prototyping
2025
Rebuilding a fast-growing brand’s digital foundation without losing its momentum in a pandemic.
Coming Soon!
Visual Direction, User Experience, User Interface, Product Strategy, Prototyping
2022
I design products and the systems that keep them working.
I've spent over a decade designing products and the systems behind them. To me they aren't separate concerns. How something looks, how it works, and how a team maintains it are one piece of work. A lot of that work is understanding the constraints. Budget, timeline, and engineering capacity show where the limits are fixed and where there is room to move. Knowing the difference is what keeps the work both useful and possible.
I lead design at Forum One, working hands-on across the agency portfolio including clients such as the Smithsonian, Gates Foundation, AARP, and Trinity Wall Street. Before that I spent seven years at Verbal+Visual, where I built the team's design system implimented across delivery. It allowed us to work quickly in low fidelity and then carry the same components into high fidelity once the wireframes were settled, so visual design and research could continue side by side.
Most of my week is spent in Figma. I prototype early, in code when it's faster, and I've folded AI tools into how I ideate, build, and document. Surface and structure matter equally to me. The work should be considered, and it should hold up over time: clear naming, good documentation, a shared language between diciplines.
Forum One, New York, NY
Current
- Led product design end to end for mission-driven clients including the Smithsonian, Gates Foundation, AARP, and Trinity Church Wall Street, embedded within cross-functional teams from discovery through shipped, production-ready UI.
- Architected design systems from the ground up, defining token structures, component libraries from atoms through organisms, and accessibility standards that gave engineering a single source of truth and accelerated build velocity.
- Established the team's critique cadence, QA process, and design-to-engineering handoff standards, raising the quality bar across a team of 8 while staying hands-on in the craft.
Freelance
2023
- Partnered with mission-driven clients on system architecture, interaction design, and journey mapping, translating ambiguous problem spaces into clear design direction.
- Restructured and rationalized design system libraries to support brand scaling and WCAG compliance across breakpoints, reducing inconsistency and rework downstream.
Verbal+Visual, New York, NY
2017-2022
- Led design across 50+ DTC ecommerce engagements from concept through launch, setting the visual and interaction standard for everything the studio shipped and maintaining a consistent craft bar across concurrent client work.
- Built Verbal+Visual's proprietary design system from design tokens through high-fidelity components, introducing atomic design principles that gave designers and engineers a shared language and powered builds across the entire client roster.
- Drove measurable business impact for clients, including a 21% conversion lift and 9% increase in average order value on a flagship rebuild that delivered ROI within its first month.
- Grew the design practice from one designer to ten, defining roles, standards, and the critique culture that let the team scale without losing quality.
UX/UI Lead
Verbal+Visual, New York, NY
Verbal+Visual, New York, NY
2015-2017
- Owned the UX process from research through wireframes and prototypes across multiple DTC ecommerce clients, translating business goals and user needs into shippable product direction.
- Grounded design decisions in real evidence through usability testing, competitive analysis, and heuristic audits, bringing research rigor into projects that had previously run on assumption.
- Partnered closely with engineers to balance user needs against technical constraints, ensuring designs held up through implementation.
Let’s collaborate and make great stuff.