Andrew Anker

Product Owner | Crossplay Digital Inc.

Elham jumped into the middle of a hectic product design process for an early stage, pre-launch product and did a fantastic job of coming up to speed quickly. Although given very little time to learn the industry (and with no budget for research), she was still able to deliver a large quantity of high quality work so we were able to keep our developers moving towards an MVP launch less than 10 weeks after her arrival. She was able to design not only the UI/UX but also the site branding and logo, authentication flows, reactions and social media assets. She took a product that historically has not had much of a “look” — crossword puzzles — and designed a colorful and visually appealing application that immediately stands out in the space.

Besides her design skills, she is a joy to work with — always friendly and welcoming input. She has the classic “strong opinions loosely held” that results in her defending her design choices while being open to modifying and developing new ideas based on input from the team. Even while going through some important family issues, she always had a smile on her face and was willing to dig into whatever problem was at hand read more on my LinkedIn

Felim Donnelly

Founder & CEO | Crossplay Digital Inc.

Elham is a stellar designer and a consummate professional. At Crossplay she was given the challenging role of Lead Product Designer on a small team and immediately thrived. With little support and on a tight timeline she created a look and feel for our product which soared, giving no indication of the challenging constraints behind its creation.

She was comfortable in a leadership position and eagerly attacked the challenge of balancing high-level vision and detailed design creation.

Elham has all the skills necessary to succeed not only as a designer but as a professional on any team. She is driven to succeed and can adapt to bring value to any project – work with her if you get the chance!

Hakha Mahsyekhi

Director of Product Design | Max, ex HBO Max

Elham is a people-centric designer. She has a wonderful understanding of end-to-end of the design process. She can help set up your design research, set up and run your brainstorming session, make sense of the most complicated systematic problems, create a prototype, launch a feature and optimize it post-launch. The icing on her cake is her visual eyes. Her passion and experience created a multi-disciplinary designer who can bring great value to your team.

Scott Mallory Jr.

Founder & Director | ISM Arts & Culture

Elham has a bird's-eye view when it comes to systems thinking, setting up bespoke avenues for research, dissecting and critiquing the industry landscape, and formulating edge for a product. In the process, she brings an unexpected combination of angles or knowledges from culture, entrepreneurship, society, impact, wearables, fashion, technology, design, architecture, and more -- an exotic understanding of innovation. She comes up with things you just would never have imagined in any scenario. Perspectives like this bring out the best ideas within a team, especially the more and more they go against the grain. Generating ideas is just one part of it -- the other is breaking them down and solving the problems at hand, where she can also take the lead and handle with poise. She can then guide this development into practical use among teams because understands all aspects of production and is also a great hands on designer.

Elham brings maturity to a project in such a way that no matter what the authority structure, working with her means asking her questions rather than giving her instructions. I think her greatest strength is pinpointing, with laser focus, the most critical and uncomfortable vulnerabilities of a project and being able to articulate the unorthodox way forward that's needed for it to thrive.