Hi, my name is Alexandru Nastase and I’m a Romanian based Visual Graphic Designer & Art Director. Born & creatively self-educated somewhere near the Black Sea in Constanta, I can proudly say that I adore designing, and that it is something which permeates my whole living. Design to me is akin to beauty. It is an externalization of my inner process regarding beauty & contentment with life and every
thing that I feel. Design is functional. An intuitive behavior based on a innovative solution which enables the object to carry out a specific task. Design isn’t about how it looks, it’s also about how it works. Design is distinctive, thus it distinguishes an object from all by underlining time-tested terms such as: simple, friendly, aesthetic. Quality over quantity, simplicity over complexity, philosophy over business, passion over rationality, creativity over rules, humanity over technology, hunger over satiety, intuition over stereotypes, consistency … all these are definitely a key to the result of a good design … of my work.
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Visual Design
I’ve been drawing/painting and self teaching art since the 4th grade. I’ve always had a visual “compulsive obsessive” instinct which permeated into what I wear, how I arrange my desk, folders, leaking into my sketches, wire-frames, prototypes and finally, into my designs. Content to me is key. Without content you’re blindly designing without reason nor context. It is the starting point from which my imagination builds up the layout, think up the colors, setup the typography to build hierarchy and grows the whole into a layout. With a strong knowledge of color theory, grid systems, typography rules and a 10 years visual design expertise, I always design for the issue at hand first and then for the intended mediums. In my belief and experience, design satisfies the need to give an understandable form to a new, shapeless idea yet remaining functional. Also visual design is not restricted to “pretty pictures/graphics”, it’s a sense of problem solving, if you’re designing and not solving a problem at the same time, in my concept, you are not a designer. Having a huge background in front-end development (I hand coded almost all my layouts) I always design according to new technologies and methodologies. Moreover, I do a strong follow up after the assets (redlines, icons/svg, images, color schemes and type specs, working prototypes, wire-frames) hand off to the developers for better implementation and validation of the layout quality.
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User Experience
The discipline came into play for me when user interface design reached me and started to become more and more a personal skill and a professional discipline. I found that to design a beautiful interface you need a beautiful experience and upon these things, like well define solutions and well developed product workflows come into play. To me, starting a design means first understanding all the business and user needs. These can be achieved through testing, reviewing and analyzing user research, usability reports and the understanding of constrains for the medium/platform at hand to determine the best UI design solutions. Good design starts with great wireframes and interaction flows/user flows, good development starts with high fidelity prototypes and well written documentation.
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Communication is Key
As an Art Director I’ve managed my own multi-cultural team, from their personal growth to their professional skills and goal achieving attitude. I’ve “brain stormed” ideas and briefs, marketing designs, video ads, mockups and prototypes going into huge detail and always through sketches, whiteboards or/and other visual methods. I’ve been also a communication bridge between design team and development team setting limitations and possibilities for projects from both points of view.
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