Tom Thorslund
ABOUT ME
Born and raised in Mississauga Ontario, Canada, I moved to South Florida when I was 15. Graduating early from high school due to the Canadian and American high school curriculum's not aligning, I decided to go straight to college. I attended the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale, studying Graphic and Desktop Design, and graduated in 2006 at the age of 19 with honors, a medal for best portfolio and a 3.6 GPA.
After graduation I soon joined the User Experience design team at Citrix, now a 4 billion dollar software company, in Fort Lauderdale as a Visual Design contractor. This is where I spent the first 4 years of my career, learning a great deal about enterprise design and contributing many assets that to this day are still in place. In 2011 I was hired on full time and transferred to the Santa Clara office in beautiful Northern California.
Moving on from Citrix after nearly 5 years, I joined the central User Experience Design team at VMware where I have been for nearly 7 years working alongside my visual design team, interaction designers, and engineers on our entire line of products, creating fresh UI's, product logos, full icon libraries, branding and detailed graphic standards. This is where I got my first Design Systems experience, building out many UI components and documenting them thoroughly on a public facing Clarity design website. This experience brought me to Mobileiron based out of Mountain View CA, where I was the Lead Visual Designer on the User Experience team, responsible for all graphics, branding, UI designs, illustrations and iconography. At Mobileiron I began building our first Sketch based Design System UI kit, defining accessible color palettes, scalable interactive patterns and a unified visual theme. In Jan of 2021 Mobileiron was acquired by Ivanti, and I was cherry picked off the UX team and placed onto the newly formed SPARK Design Systems team, to lead building out a brand new Design System from the ground up. This allowed me great creative freedom to define a fresh visual style for our component library, as well as build out dozens of newly refined components and an exhaustive WCAG compliant color system.
For the last 2+ years I have now shifted professional arenas into financial tech, working with Charles Schwab on the Everest Design System’s team. Like before, I brought my Design Systems expertise to help re-engineer the existing design system, modernizing and converting from Sketch to Figma. After 2 years as a UX Designer contractor, I was hired on full time as a Senior UX Manager, responsible for leading designs on the Design System Figma UI Kits (Web, iOS and Android), Documentation website, Competitive Analysis, Figma Training, Iconography and WCAG compliance.
With 19 years of industry experience, on top of many years in public speaking and performing live as a musician (charting on college radio and winning Best New Album in South Florida), I am able both to lead, collaborate, and present designs and ideas effectively with my team members, always open to take whatever critique or ideas I'm offered to heart and work them into pleasing new directions.
Thank you for taking the time to explore my career. Please feel welcome to reach out and connect!