MONIROM SOUTHAKAKOUMAR
It's pronounced money-rum, like what you spend and drink.
I'm a Design Director currently focused on Product Design and UX-UI. Experienced. Award-Winning. Strategic. I practice what I preach.
With 18+ years of experience in both hands-on design and design management roles, I've leveraged my talent at small studios, global agencies, tech giants and scrappy start-ups. I can pitch and execute the creative. I'm at my best when given the opportunity to exercise both sides of my brain.
Clients tell me I am an empathetic designer and design staff consider me a giving, yet firm manager. I’m constant in my ability to spark the gears of inspiration and start the creative process. I love to color outside the lines and eat paste. I break things and put them back together again. My designers are expected to do the same.
I’ve designed for the likes of TechCrunch, Engadget, the Huffington Post, Proctor & Gamble, Miller Brewing, Microsoft, National Geographic, Pfizer, AOL, Ford Motor Company, US Airways, and the AIA.
I am an anomaly. An amalgam of graphic design, advertising, PR, publication, brand, and identity design as seen through the lens of a product designer. I earned a BFA in Communication Arts from Virginia Commonwealth University, and I've been working in mobile app and web design prior to the advent of smartphones.
Though I now work in tech, my past work includes campaigns that gave voice to the tragedy in Darfur, multilingual collateral for the World Health Organization, graphic design for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's initiatives to improve education and global health, congressional reports for the DHS and designs for DaimlerChrysler's campaign to reduce teen driving fatalities.
I'm specifically drawn to design that makes a difference since we all should be yearning to be part of something greater than ourselves.
I'm currently a CoFounding Partner and Design Director, UX-UI @ Umano I/O