Luke Young: Web Design and Development, Digital Illustration

A little about me.

Hello, I'm Luke—a working class web specialist living in Elgin, Illinois. Feel free to click around the navigation to explore the site!

I studied 3D Modeling, Animation, Illustration, Digital Design, and more at 'The American Academy of Art.' It was there I honed my artisitc ability and wet my apetite for the commercial arts. After graduating, I cut my teeth as a web designer and developer at a small photography company. I've been at it ever since, and today I hold a great deal of industry experience after working in ecommerce for over a decade.

These days, I handle marketing for Mindful Practices and Class Catalyst, where I designed and built both companies' websites in WordPress—picking up a lot of hands-on CMS experience along the way.

View Resume in Google Docs

Mindful Practices & Class Catalyst

At Mindful Practices & Class Catalyst, I've worked as a Web & Design Specialist since February 2021, acting as a resourceful hand for the team and our partners in the well-being space. I blend front-end development and graphic design to craft content that's polished, impactful, and true to the meaningful work we do.

I manage projects from concept to delivery, wearing both a technical and creative hat depending on what the team needs that week.

Digital & Front-End Development

I use WordPress for content curation and site management, build and deploy targeted email campaigns through MailChimp, and design and develop custom web pages and modules with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript—keeping an eye on web standards and squashing the bugs that crop up along the way.

Creative Design & Project Management

On the design side, I create a full spectrum of marketing and promotional assets—slide decks, digital banners, print materials, fliers, and apparel—using tools like Sketch, GIMP, Inkscape, and Affinity Photo. I keep projects organized and on track with Monday, and collaborate with the team and partners through Slack and video calls to keep everything aligned.

Sears Holdings Corporation

At SHC, I started out as a Junior Web Developer, worked my way up to Senior Web Developer, and then finally became a Web Development Manager in 2014. During this time period, I worked with many different people on various teams throughout the organization to develop everything from simple web banners, to full-fledged web applications.

We utilized lots of software and web dev technology to fullfill the needs of project stakeholders. It was a fast-paced, deadline-driven environment, with lots of creative and passionate people from all walks of life.

June 2010 – April 2013

Just starting out at the company, my team was responsible for hard-coding content on the Sears and Kmart websites. We worked closely with the online-marketing team, as well as web designers to create promotional banners, landing pages, and social media campaigns. There were many challenges at this time, as we had not yet found a CMS capable of handling the volume of requests in an efficient way. We had daily promotional changes on each of the various categories from all business-unit stakeholders.

May 2013 – November 2020

After gaining the title of Senior Web Developer, working on more advanced long-term projects, and developing a great rapport with my colleages, I took a leadership role and became a Manager. I helped in the decision-making process for the technology stacks implmented on our websites, established project timeframes, estimated budget costs, identified the appropriate resources and skillsets required for us to work as efficiently as possible. During this time, I helped implement, and support the Adobe Experience Manager CMS to streamline process.

Calumet Photographic

Calumet was my first job out of college. It started as a part time internship which turned into an full-time position as a Web Designer. I was not only able to hone my design capabilities by developing templates for email campaigns, landing pages, banners, and other web content, I was also able to learn the basics of writing HTML and CSS. I worked closely with copywriters and back-end developers to design and currate content for the American, British, Dutch, and German versions of our website.

I was responsible for creating our eBlast template that we sent out weekly to our 4 main email lists in the US, UK, Germany, and Netherlands. Every week, I designed and coded the eBlasts for the UK and Netherlands, while one of my fellow designers handled the US and Germany. We worked closely together to align on design techniquies and best practices, as well as maintained a solid HTML template that was compliant in almost every email application. We had a "Photo of the Week" contest in which members or our site could submit their photos to be featured within these emails, as well as our Homepages.

As a Designer, I was responsible for the integrity of the look and feel of our websites. However, I was also able to practice writing code by creating landing pages for various promotions and events. I worked closely with our development team to write HTML and CSS as semantically as possible. This sparked my interest in coding, and enabled me to learn a very valuable new skill-set. I continued to design and code pages until my departure from the company in 2010.