Resume
Lee Billington is an executive design leader with 18 years experience, operating at the cutting edge of emerging technologies and markets.
Leveraging his ability to unite and lead cross-disciplinary global teams to disrupt industries with FinTech, Lee has led design at prestigious companies like frog Design, Gensler, and FIS Global.
His work ranges from leading design for new ventures with FIS Impact Labs to building successful practice areas at Gensler—the world's largest architecture firm—focused on the transformation of digital and physical integrations and breaking traditional norms and expectations about how digital is integrated into our daily lives. He successfully led an innovation lab for Chaotic Moon (now Fjord Austin, acquired by Accenture), and directed teams through design research, detailed design, and product development while Creative Director for global innovation firm, frog Design.
A trend-spotter of emerging markets and technologies, Lee has led product creation on Oculus, Google Glass, Leap Motion, and other emerging platforms, driven by a desire to design for tomorrow’s users. He has also developed applications and installations for some of the world’s biggest brands, including AT&T, Beats by Dre, Bose, Caesars Palace, DARPA, Fox, IBM, Microsoft, Mozilla, National Geographic Channel, Nike, Spotify, Toyota, and Twitter.
Today, Lee leverages his extensive experience in innovation to experiment with new AI tools, exploring the exponential impact on the business of design.
Experience
NAX Group
Jan 2023-Present
Head of Design
NAX is a fintech and AI software and services company that builds long term joint ventures with our corporate partners. We leverage our proprietary machine learning platform to rapidly discover, build, launch and scale new consumer and enterprise products and businesses in months.
As Head of Design, I lead our multi-faceted design organization through the entire venture creation process, from ideation and prototyping to testing and scaling, utilizing AI-based solutions for rapid venture development.
FIS Global
Aug 2021-Dec 2022
Co-Founder and Chief Design Officer, DCO Ventures
Envisioning a world where frictionless finance is within reach for everyone on the planet, the team that founded operated FIS’ corporate venture builder—launching several companies leading to 2 acquisitions—set out to build fintechs that harness the benefits of sophisticated financial systems without the constraints of the past.
DCO Ventures was a Denver-based venture builder focused on developing companies that tackled the intersection of conventional finance and digital assets. Our team of 15 talented individuals from various fields, including product, engineering, design, strategy, operations, and research, worked together for six months.
During this period, we met with more than 70 venture capitalists, family offices, and ultra-high-net-worth individuals. We were able to secure commitments for almost half of the $60M total investment we were seeking, but due to unfavorable macroeconomic trends in the fintech and digital asset sectors, we were unable to secure follow-on funding in time.
VP, Global Head of Design - Innovation
I led design at FIS Impact Labs—the corporate venture building arm of Fortune 200 company, FIS. Our team transformed major problem areas, frictions, and unmet customer needs within commerce into hyper-growth ventures that leveraged the unfair advantage presented by FIS.
Gensler
Jul 2017-Jul 2021
Global Director of Connected Experiences
Spearheaded the creation of the Connected Experiences offering within the Digital Experience Design practice area—focused on holistic design solutions for tenants, employees, fans, travelers, and all users. We helped clients understand their technology touchpoint challenges and make sense of the solutions available.
Regional Head of Digital Experience Design
Led the Digital Experience Design practice for the South Central region, building immersive, connected and intelligent spaces, redefining the user experience, and blurring the lines between analog and digital
We worked with the world’s biggest companies to extend their brands and redefine their users’ experiences in immersive, built environments.
Notable clients include American Airlines, AT&T (The AT&T Discovery District), Capital One, Vodafone, and Girl Scouts of America.
frog Design
Mar 2021-June 2017
Creative Director
Led global teams of strategists and designers through transformation design engagements for design and innovation firm, frog. Identified and targeted new business verticals, led design research, concepting, interaction design, visual design, prototyping, user testing and software development.
Integrated with two large international organizations, working closely with their internal teams to institute design thinking into their existing products and concept new product offerings. Led workshops and multi-day training and ideation sessions, evolved those concepts to visual designs and prototypes, and performed iterative user testing to validate findings.
Chaotic Moon Studios
Dec 2012-Feb 2014
Director of Labs
Responsible for leading mobile designers and partnering with internal developers to develop mobile applications for Fortune 500 companies, and personally executing strategic engagements.
Led the design, development and execution of internal research and development, emerging technology software development, and client projects. My team and I explored bleeding-edge technology, innovated to solve everyday problems, and pushed the limits of human-computer interfaces.
Notable clients include Beats, National Geographic, Fox, and Caesars Palace.
Beak Labs
2011-2016
Co-Founder Beak was a collaboration of storytellers, technologists, and artists creating convergent media experiences in human connections. We combined story with media and technology to create rich, immersive, and interactive digital art experiences.
Our first installation was an interactive video gallery for Microsoft which was featured at TEDx Austin.
Other notable clients include Nike, Spotify, Bose, Mozilla and Twitter.
Guest speaker in 2016 for BizBash to discuss emerging trends in event installation technologies and experiences
Upstream Communications
Nov 2005-Dec 2012
Creative Director
Managed design team from pre-production to final delivery on over 300 projects. Conceived, designed, and developed a multi-million dollar fundraising tool used by some of the largest political campaigns in the country.
Awarded American Association of Political Consultants Pollie in 2009, 2010, and three Pollies in 2011. Awarded Politics Magazine Reed Award in 2009, 2010, and two in 2011.
Guest speaker in Berlin, Germany for the MDU annual politics seminar.
References
Lee is an enthusiastic and supportive creative leader with a dedication to delivering successful work steeped in innovation and creativity. He consistently modeled a positive leadership style in order to help instill those skills on his team as well as personally help me grow as creative director. Lee always made himself available to empathetically listen to challenges I was working through and help me constructively problem solve. He was also willing and able to step up when his support was needed to maintain the integrity of the work and the morale and dedication of our team. Even after collaborating closely on projects and moving onto different opportunities, Lee still mentors me through my career and offers honest and valuable guidance.
There's a lot I can say about Lee from our time working together as his lead-by-example style positively influenced many facets of our studio. He was pivotal in helping to envision and lead the experience design for an advanced product that proactively prevented cyber attacks for one of frog's largest clients for 2+ years in the government space - including helping to build and navigate his design team among 20+ other teams to make this product a reality. With a deep understanding of advanced technology and an active relationship builder, Lee helped us build our portfolio of clients - constantly pushing teams to go further. And as a manager/mentor, he gained a lot of respect from those he influenced by the care and guidance he continually offered. Because his strengths in design and leadership are so multi-faceted, you can always count on him to over-deliver on expectations. I hope to one day work with Lee again.
Lee and I worked together on an epic Digital Transformation project which lasted for many, many, many months. As leader of the Frog team Lee was always pragmatic and forward thinking - managing to navigate a design process which was complicated by an unforgiving business and technical environment. Lee was a nice guy to work with and directed his team of UI/UX/tech people really well.