About Me
Hello. My name is Ben Paddock. I am a design leader and strategist with 17+ years of experience crafting intuitive, beautiful digital experiences and building efficient, creative, tight-nit design teams. With empathy and trust, I’ve led product designers, graphic designers, art directors (who in turn oversaw ither graphic designers), and front-end developers.
Presently, I’m co-founder and founding designer of a stealth startup. I really enjoy building something out of nothing, which is why I gravitate towards startups, but I’m also open to full-time work at more established businesses.
Most recently, I served as the VP, Head of Design at Extend Enterprises. Over 5 years, I went from Lead Designer to building a small buy mighty fullstack design team. Collaborating closely with product and engineering, I spearheaded two big pivots: one early on, moving the entire product from a P2P tool to a B2B2C spend management platform that generates revenue; and a few years in, expanding our interface’s scope from individuals at a business to whole organizations. These rapid, outsized shifts were made possible by an evolving design system my team built, allowing us to rapidly generate design concepts, flow diagrams, and hi-fi visuals without missing a beat.
Previously, I was Design Director at Blenderbox.com, an interactive design agency that specializes in mission-driven organizations, non-profits, education design, and civic work. In my time there, I led multi-disciplinary teams in creating innovative, complex products, applications, and websites. One highlight is my work on NYC MySchools, where I led design for the company’s biggest project at the time, and one that has since flourished into a standalone product. Involving building a complex, scalable, modular design system from scratch in an under-researched area of school application systems, we built a tool that serves 2million+ parents and children every year.
In my spare time, I enjoy biking, traveling, any kind of game, and writing. I’m currently writing a set of short stories, as well as an educational children’s book.
Clients I’ve worked with (most of my projects have led to long-term engagements):
Extend Enterprises
NYC DoE
NYC.gov / NYC Mayor’s Office
Massport (Boston Logan International Airport)
Carnegie
Mellon
Yale Law School
NH DoE
Brainfacts
Society for Neuroscience
College Board
Lincoln Center Theater