Mick Santostefano

My Role

Creative Director

Skills

UI Design UX Design Visual Design Wireframing Design Thinking Prototyping Brand Strategy Data Visualization Interaction Design Graphic Design Design for Print Illustration Motion Graphics Video Editing

Technologies

HTML CSS CSS Grid / Flex Font-end Frameworks Github Sublime Text Javascript Ruby SVG Animate InDesign Photoshop Illustrator AfterEffects

Remind me what the colors mean?

Company

vThreat Inc.

SaaS B2B B2C Startup

Background

Being at the very beginning stages as a startup, the UI and brand identity was lacking in cohesion and definition, and a user story was still unfolding, and all the functionality was still needing to be designed developed. It was ground zero for this cybersecurity startup. I designed and built the UI and design system for the cybersecurity cloud-based platform. I helped define the user journey and crafted the user experience to be intuitive enough so even 'Grandma' could use it (I doubt she would...). I produced all graphics, illustrations, and iconography for the app, as well as for various marketing materials. Working closely with the founder/CTO and senior developer, we managed to completely build out the platform within a year which was well received by users and others in the industry.

"We help people not suck at Cybersecurity."

vThreat is a cloud-based web app that allows users to help increase incident response time to cyber threats by optimizing security practices. A medium part of the platform entails implementing simulated attack drills that are non-damaging so that the security manager can see where the potential pitfalls are in either their procedure or software configurations. This is a serious business. To contrast this serious and often stressful subject, I decided to run with a fun and playful approach to make it fun and easy to use.

Design & Development

While working with the CTO and the lead dev as they created the back-end framework in Rails, I designed all the user flows, coded the front-end UI, designed logos & iconography, defined brand standards, developed motion graphics, and all marketing materials. Based on user feedback I continuously worked to optimize for the most intuitive and entertaining user experience, gluing it all together with a fun meta-narrative. Unfortunately, I do not have any screenshots of the app product flows. 😟

It took 1 year for 3 of us to complete all aspects of the company product - Ah, the beauty of a small operation!

Fun, Engaging, & Unique.

I created a variety of graphics that added to the narrative of sneaky cyber threats. I tried to use characters to personify and reference cyber threats in the hope it may help users put a face on an invisible opponent. Cyber threats are an unfortunate fact of life, and the more we can recognize them, the more we can be vigilant to not let them in.

Design for Print

Spreading the word about great technology requires swag. Of course, it helps to stand out from the rest of the crowd. VThreat attended many trade shows and expos including Black Hat, Infosec, and Defcon where we had t-shirts, info-cards, stickers, and displays that definitely got some attention.

Motion Graphics

I had a lot of opportunities to use animation in the UI, demos, videos, and animated gifs. It was a lot of fun telling the vThreat story.

Are you ready?

The whole platform has changed since I was there, and VThreat is now Threatcare. I am thankful I got to participate in the beginnings of an awesome company.

The threat of cyber-attack is ever-present... "Start Using Attack Simulations Today! Verify your security controls with 100% cloud-based simulations."

Get your company threat ready

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