Collaborator

In life, as in work, it's the people who matter. It's the relationships. The connection. The chemistry. The experience of working and collaborating with another human being, whom you can call a friend and have lunch or dinner with, and have plenty to talk about besides work. David is one of those warm, wonderful human beings you'd follow to the ends of the Earth to work with. Goes without saying he's also a consummate professional and passionately committed to his craft. He's the real deal.

It's a pleasure to work with David. He is always a game creative partner, who brings solutions to the table after careful thought, communicates feedback well, and deftly pulls off new projects and collaboration with strapped resources and budget. I've learned much about brand experience in packaging, hardware, software, and marketing through David's leadership at Clover. I would jump at the chance to work with him again!

David is one of the most creative and talented design professionals I know. It has been a pleasure working with him for the last year and partnering on initiatives like building our Talent Brand, rolling out an exciting new Website refresh, and ensuring company-wide alignment on marketing, employee, branding, and product design. David approaches each initiative with a unique and artistic perspective. His creativity is contagious and he is a great colleague.

David emits a creative buzz that gets teams excited and thinking beyond their normal comfort zone. I had the chance to work with him on several projects, and I always admired how enthusiastic he was, how he prodded and encouraged unconventional approaches, and made it all pretty darn fun! I recommend him highly.

David is one of the most creative people I've ever worked with. He pays attention to every detail and thinks outside of the box. His work on the hardware design and branding of the Groupon point of sale system was incredibly inspiring. It was hands down one of the coolest projects at the company. David is a great communicator and story teller. I really enjoyed working with him and I hope some day I get the opportunity to do it again.

I had the opportunity of working with David, back in 2002 in IconMedialab both in Madrid and Portugal. It was such a great experience that since then we have maintain our close relationship in all his steps in USA. David is one of this unique professionals who has the capacity to combine the most radical and disruptive creative & cross boundaries process with outstanding professional & excellent execution. Even more David, has an open mind, heart and will attitude combine with a solid & authentic character and leadership allowing him to engage, empower and lead creative multidisciplinary teams to excellence. I highly recommend him for any challenge who requires an outstanding creative & innovation leader & I will love to keep close and find opportunities to develop projects together.

David is amazing person who know how to appreciate the hard work and motivate people around him to reach new heights. He is a great storyteller with innovative vision. His body of work is beyond just design technicalities and it reach out to you on personal level. His passion for story telling and brand experience was instrumental in taking Groupon merchant brand to the next level. He wasn’t my direct manager but he always reached out to inspire and give my best to the brand. David is a visionary who has strong sense of universal Design and branding business. I would like to wok with him again in near future.

I had the great pleasure of working with David at Groupon. His design process heavily emphasizes research and ideation. Our research looked at competition, industry trends, and our customers. He taught me to dive deep into our customers' experiences to find inspiration for our ideas. During the ideation phase, he encouraged our team to think without limitations. Our ideas could be as big and outrageous as we wanted them to be. We would then scale down these ideas to make them cost effective, realistic, and logistically possible. Not only is David a thought leader, but he is a good manager. He is passionate about his employees' growth and happiness. He makes sure to include his whole team in projects and finds teaching moments during any hardship. He is able to navigate politics within large organizations and gives credit where credit is due. David would be a great addition to any creative team looking for a leader who knows how to inspire creatives.

David is exactly what I expect out of creative leadership. He provoked, instigated, inspired, and embodied the high visionary quality he mandated of his team. After working together, I have deep respect for his openness and collaborative spirit. His craft is pure precision. And he has the most unique ability to bring focus to the wildest creative landscape, and still keep it wild and creative.

David is one of the most inspiring designers I know. His passion is contagious and his forward thinking is groundbreaking. Chat to him for 30 minutes and your mind will open to a new world of possibilities. David is one of the people you see succeed in life and be proud that you had the chance to get to know him on a professional and personal level. It has been a real privilege to work alongside David and I would most definitely enjoy working with him again in the future.

David is an incredible creative asset to our organization. His passion for design coupled with his knowledge and experience in creative principles, market trends and product history make him a comprehensive expert in engaging and delighting customers. He is also a tremendous team player, and I had the distinct pleasure of working with him on several hardware design projects. He has my most enthusiastic recommendation!

David is a great balance of design architecture, creativity, technology and problem solving. David inherently understands business problems product managers need to solve while keeping the user experience in mind. He produces solutions that are attainable depending on resource or time constraints. I recommend working with David, especially if you have challenging product needs where you need to keep the larger product goals in mind in order to avoid short-term fixes that will just result in more work later in time.

I worked with David at Apogee Networks (name changed to Evident Software) where he was the Creative Director. What always struck me about David was his passion for design and attention to detail. Apogee Networks was a startup which was evolving its products and messaging. David helped make that transformation possible with his knack for distilling the essential elements to create a simple and elegant user interface that was easy and intuitive. David worked tirelessly on several iterations of the corporate logo, web site design/layout and marketing collateral to present a professional corporate image to our prospects, customers and partners while also capturing the dynamism of a startup. In addition to his professionalism, David enhanced the work environment with his innate curiosity of learning, sense of humor and dancing skills.

I had the opportunity to collaborate with David on a high-visibility, high-impact visual identity project which touched hundreds of employees (and in turn, millions of customers) at Microsoft. Working with him was a pleasure and a learning experience due to his deep expertise, natural ease, inclusive style, and infectious passion. He’s an asset to any organization he decides to join because once he’s committed, his focus and drive are second to none.

I really enjoyed working with David to unify icon art across platforms. I was a PC in a Mac shop but even so David and I were able to cross that cultural divide and work very smoothly together. He always had time for me, and even though he is passionate about his work he doesn't get over-excited. He just quietly gets it done. That's the best kind of competent.

David was a forceful change agent for BitTorrent, pushing us view our products and brand in new ways. He was a key driver of virtually all of our new product initiatives as the hands-on creative lead. He was also able to significantly elevate design within the company and ultimately build a strong team, strategic to all our efforts. A skillful and articulate communicator, David is a natural design leader and was a great partner to product development.

David is a very strong design mind and manager. While we worked together in the Product/UX group at Ask I saw consistently high quality work coming from David and the team he built. David's team was integral to every high profile project and also contributed expertise to R&D work. The company is a lot better for having him - as is anyone fortunate enough to hire him.

David was in charge of the UI/UX team at BitTorrent during the time I worked there. His work is the highest quality and I recommend him as a colleague and a friend. David was particularly skilled at design, and creating software with feeling and motivation that worked.

David is an extremely talented and thoughtful user experience designer. While working with him at BitTorrent, I was impressed by his ability to push the boundaries and create a more unified brand. Moreover, his ability to articulate the rules of design was an invaluable part of educating the company and moving them toward change. David is a dynamic individual who brings passion to the job, and is a great resource to any company who is lucky enough to have him.

David has an amazing eye for spectacular design - high fidelity imagery and composition that not only is easy to consume but makes informational sense. He was a breath of fresh air to work with, an infectious enthusiasm and sense of humour which help make projects enjoyable to work through. If you are looking for design that pushes the boundries, engages people, is legible and makes people say 'wow', all in one package, then I can't think of another person to recommend. I would certainly work with David again should the opportunity arise.

David is a truly exceptional talent in the area of user design and experience. Specifically, at Lithium David was able to create for my team ground breaking analytic reports that were able to summarize in a highly intuitive and graphical way, extremely complex underlying data and relationships. David also developed customer facing training and support products that differentiated us from our competition. Occasionally you get to work with someone who's skills are so natural and frankly awe inspiring - David is that person.

I had the pleasure to work with David in this exciting IPTV Set-Top Box project for the Spanish market. David brings a wealth of marketing, technical and usability experience in the field of information architecture. His professionalism and mastery of his trade combined with his unique level of creativity and lateral thinking make him very unique resource. I would recommend him without hesitation.

David can be summed up in one word: PASSION. The guy has tons of it. He knows what he likes, he's articulate about what makes it good and inspires people around him to get excited about it, too. He is a designer of exceptional taste and talent.

I’ve found few people I enjoy working with more than I did Dahveed when he was VP of UX at Ask.com. He’s a guy who knows how to build teams, how to get them excited about design, and how to bring every bit of his experience (15 yrs? 20?) from places like Nike & Microsoft into play. Maybe most important---and I say this as someone who’s been both a leader and follower—I don’t know if I’ve met a person in his position who’s as willing to roll up his sleeves and pitch in. That takes a familiarity, dedication, and straight-up team spirit that I’ve found in few leaders. Some people say you need a lot of ego to head up departments or entire companies. David is an proof that you don’t—because he does it with smarts, chops, a wealth of experience, and just enough empathy to inspire his teams to give their all.

David entered the nike.com scene just as we were struggling to find our voice; nike.com was launched and we had some crazy features going on, but David brought creative vision, indeed a voice, to nike.com that was mature, well-crafted and years ahead of the 'net. David was also key in building and shaping the team that would lead nike.com out of it's schizophrenic ‘marketing/advertising/gaming’ zone into it’s unique full on e-commerce, global interactive presence. David - along with being a creative genius, is well versed in the technology and business aspects of the interactive space. Grab him if you can.

David is a man of the times. He is intelligent and witty with a must-do attitude along with the knowledge and skills to back it up. He is able to think 2-3 thoughts ahead of the rest. He is a consummate professional with a friendly demeanor and an ethical approach to his work and life. It was great to see how he managed his team with respect and open communication. I would heartily recommend him to my friends and clients.”

David is not just a leader and true visionary in user experience design, but an excellent teacher and partner as well. As a colleague and internal client at Lithium Technologies, I saw David transform the brand of that company through both a willingness to push the boundaries of design, while still balancing the needs of the business and the users to accomplish their goals. To do this, he built an amazing team of designers, forged strong relationships with key business and customer stakeholders, and through it all maintained a willingness to listen and understand the true needs of his clients that resulted in not just amazing and impactful designs, but designs that worked. Enthusiastic, passionate, dedicated and appreciative of others, David is a game-changer for any organization looking to take their users' experience to the next level.

I first came to know David when interviewing him for the position of Director of User Experience for Ask.com. In short order, it was apparent that he was the ideal candidate. From his resume, his pedigree – with senior design roles at the likes of Nike and Microsoft and a leadership role at IconMedialab – and the scope of his experience, both geographically and product type-wise, were hard to match. During the interview process, at which time I was assessing him against other potential candidates, he shined. His commercial successes to that point spoke to his creativity and visual talent, business savvy, use of user-centered process to innovate, brand understanding, ability to work at a gulpingly fast pace, cross-functional influencing skills, and team leadership abilities. I had come to know him better on a personal level while he was progressing at Ask.com, where he was quickly elevated to VP. He is passionate and ambitious and at the same time sensitive to the needs and desires of others. David is a great find, and I recommend him highly.

It is with great pleasure that I recommend David; I had the opportunity to work with David while he was the UX Manager at Ask.com. An excellent leader and mentor, David grew the UX team from a group of 3 designers suffering from high attrition to a cohesive group of 12 designers - possibly the most motivated group in the company. On the creative side, David's ideas were always fresh and out of the box - but he's also receptive to and open for feedback. David brings diverse experience and unique talent, that made a real differernce in each one of the projects we collaborated on. Whether it's a product architecture map, hand made sketch or high resolution mock, David always delivered on time with the highest results. As a manager, David has a unique ability to recruit talent and to then train and motivate designers.

David is a rare individual with whom I've been able to have meaningful discussions about the art and science of craftsmanship in the context of delivering world class software. While I was an engineer on the Windows Live team David provided critical user experience leadership and direction, both in-person and through a Human Interface Guidelines web and print publication, for the functionality, look and feel of a broad scope of Windows Live resources that our team worked to implement. I would feel fortunate and grateful to have that kind of clarity on any future project and would value working with David again.

David has been an excellent colleague and mentor at Microsoft and Ask.com. At both companies, we worked together on several projects, from component-based shared controls to internal tools for managing images. David is friendly and responsible and I welcome the opportunity to work with him again!

During my time as a colleague of David's, and since that time as professional acquaintances, David has consistently impressed me with his skill, insight and intense drive to produce quality, innovative interface work. He is an excellent manager, a tireless thinker, and a fantastic bridge builder. He is adept at building consensus around compelling user experience solutions between disparate and multifaceted business groups in a company, and equally great at building creative, productive, and cohesive design teams. David is a guaranteed star on any team and I recommend him highly.

Dahveed's attention to detail, enthusiasm for excellence and cool mentoring vibe makes him the one of the best boss I've had the chance to work with in my career. Dahveed also has a positive and contagious work ethics, all in the best possible meaning of the word. I feed off Dahveed's creative energy and I can confidently say that he is a great role model for creative people such a myself.