Billups Design

As founder and managing partner of his web development consultancy in Chicago, Billups Design, Ted has successfully built long-standing relationships with some of the country’s largest companies by championing their brands online. Ted Billups’ passion for building positive online brand user experience and profitable web sites is grounded in a professional philosophy that balances creativity, usability and functionality to achieve extraordinary results.

Ted Billups has more than fourteen years of experience as an online brand manager, creative director and designer/programmer for agencies like Turner Broadcasting, Web Design Group, Inc. and Divine, Inc. He has headed creative and technology teams managing such brands as Virgin Records, Nike, Secret, Coca-Cola, Mark Shale, United Air Lines, CNN/TBS/TNT, Parlano/MindAlign, NASA, and Hyatt Worldwide. Notable projects: creating the first online university (Cardean / Unext) and MBA user experience courses under the tutelage/review of Don Norman and Jakob Nielsen, working on the first cnn.com web site before it launched, architecting a 16,000+ page pta.org web site to under 3,000 pages, creating a 40x15 foot digital video/3D presentation for an international sales team that included a Formula One car and Robert Palmer dancers, and finally perhaps the most bittersweet accomplishment of selling a 75-person Web Design Group, Inc. to a technology incubator in early 2000.

In 2007, Ted Billups partnered with a small group of developers to create MeerMeer, a revolutionary web site testing tool for web developers that was later purchased by Adobe Systems Inc.. Unofficially, it's expected to roll out in early 2009 (likely as part of Dreamweaver). As one of the four owners, Ted Billups contributed to the modeling of the application with time-tested software processes, strategy sessions and scrubbing assumptions / findings against marketing data. This lead to Charles Stevenson and him co-creating the brand, user experience/interaction and related architecture, interface and iconography, front-end scripting and Software as a Service business model. The MeerMeer team, along with an extremely supportive group of advisers (including James C Anderson, Liz Vukas, Ryan LaSalle, Sid Siddiqui and many others), helped the application reach beta with an extremely positive reception from web agencies and software companies worldwide including Oracle, Yahoo! and Microsoft.

Ted Billups is well recognized in the Chicago design community and is a member of the American Institute of Graphic Artists (AIGA). He has also served on the Junior Board of Directors at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is currently a member of The Chicago Bar Foundation Board of Advisors.

Ted Billups attended Michigan State University and earned his BA in Advertising in 1994, with emphasis in mathematics and visual design. He received the American Marketing Association Outstanding Achievement Award for 2004, was the co-recipient of the 2006 Horizon Interactive Awards Bronze Medal for eCommerce, and, most recently, the prestigious W3 Awards 2006 Silver Medal for Online Fashion Retail.

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Ted Billups enjoys biking, illustration, painting, coins, golf, walking, jewelry and music (he can only play harmonica but listens to anything good). Lately he prefers oils and pastels (both the ‘real’ thing and digitally with a 6x11 Wacom tablet). Watercolors and acrylics are a close second. He wishes he hadn't given up on the trumpet in 7th grade so that he could belt out a few notes now - there is always retirement. In 1994 Ted Billups owned the user account ~spam at World Wide Access before the phrase was applied to bad email (he closed the account shortly thereafter ;-)

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