Steven Vanden Heuvel

Resume

Steven Vanden Heuvel

Principal Designer

Aurora, IL · Chicago area · Open to remote

Download PDF

Summary

Principal Designer at PayPal (contract via Magnit Global) from December 2025 to August 2026, working as a product designer on consumer checkout and merchant-facing payment flows for top global brands on weekly sprint cycles. Spent 18 years at MTG Media Group building design systems for 7 B2B brands across responsive web, email, and print. Fintech background spanning consumer finance, financial products, consumer checkout, merchant tooling, and high-stakes payment flows. Build with agentic tooling, Claude Code and Cursor, every day. Four-time Jesse H. Neal Award winner.

Experience

Principal Designer, Merchant Enablement

PayPal

Chicago, IL and remote · December 2025 to August 2026

  • Designed a modular checkout flow library for grocery, retail, restaurant, and subscription merchants, covering product selection through payment confirmation.
  • Produced 20+ complete merchant proposal packages for PayPal's top 100 global brands on weekly sprint cycles. PM brief to final deliverable in 5 days, including wireframes, high-fidelity screens, annotated components, and flow specs.
  • Built the Figma board mapping the checkout dead end customers hit with no working card to pay, one of the most frequent checkout patterns, back to the earlier points where they could have fixed it. Structured it with Claude Code from a director's diagram and gathered screens from teams across the company. The work reached senior leadership and became the template the team now uses to map the next flows.
  • On my own initiative, built a Figma plugin that cut merchant flow setup from most of a day to 10 to 15 minutes across the 38-merchant program, now used by the full Merchant XD team.

VP and Creative Director

MTG Media Group · grew from Senior Art Director

Chicago, IL and remote · 18 years

  • Led a 6-person creative team across 7 publication brands and 6 responsive web products at MTG Media Group, building and owning the design system for all 7 properties.
  • Initiated the brand-site rebuilds and introduced mobile-first responsive design, Figma, and Atomic Design through Pattern Lab, and began the team's move to Storybook.js.
  • Plate: grew a recipe-database site into a full content platform across Recipes, Trends, Food News, and Magazine. Won the 2017 Jesse H. Neal Award for Best Website.
  • Project Blackbird: designed and built a dynamically responsive oral-history site. Grand Jesse H. Neal Finalist, top 4 nationally.
  • Meatingplace: designed a modern responsive rebuild of MTG's highest-traffic daily news site, where 95% of readers reported taking action from content. The brand was acquired before the rebuild launched.
  • Alt-Meat: built the brand, magazine, responsive site, and enewsletters in under 8 weeks.

Founder and Designer

Steven Design Services LLC

Aurora, IL · Concurrent

  • Design systems, responsive web products, and product strategy.

Skills

  • Design Systems
  • Service Blueprints
  • UX and UI Design
  • Prototyping
  • Wireframing
  • Information Architecture
  • Interaction Design
  • Accessibility
  • AI-assisted workflows (Claude Code, Cursor)
  • Figma
  • Front-end tooling (Astro, React, TypeScript, Node, Python)

Recognition

  • 4 Jesse H. Neal Awards
  • 6 Neal Finalists
  • 1 Grand Neal Finalist (top 4 nationally)
  • Folio OZZIE Honorable Mention
  • Multiple ASBPE Awards
  • Northwestern Medill Guest Speaker

Education

University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, B.A. in Art with emphasis in Graphic Design and Marketing