Gabriel Williams
Product Designer and Technical Artist
Denver, CO, USA

Contact: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ofgabriel/
Portfolio: www.sixbysevenstudio.com

Education

The Illinois Institute of Art-Schaumburg: Bachelor of Fine Arts in Game Art & Design (December 2008)

Skills

Projects I Led: Unity Overlays, Unity Contextual Tooling System, Unity Authoring Workflows

Digital Tool Design: 12+ years. Unity Splines, ProBuilder, PolysketchVR, Overdrive Toolset

Technical:

• Figma
• Unity 3D
• Unreal Engine
• Hammer (Source Game Engine)
• Blender
• 3DS Max
• Adobe Suite

Experience

Unity Technologies, Senior Product Designers: June 2017 – February 2025. As Senior Product Designer for Scene Tooling, I pitched, designed, and drove the creation of the Contextual Tooling System, Overlays, and Splines, among other projects. These projects introduced first-of-their-kind workflows that supported both internal and external (custom) toolsets, addressing a wide range of user needs. I drove cross-functional collaboration by aligning historically siloed teams and stakeholders, ensuring adoption and long-term scalability of the tooling ecosystem. I advocated for a user-centered approach, successfully establishing scalable design solutions that became integral to Unity’s ecosystem.

ProCore Toolset, Owner and Co-Founder: May 2012 – February 2025. Independently designing, marketing, and building custom artist tools for Unity (with Karl Henkel, co-founder). As an indie game dev and through connections to others, I saw several clear pain points in Unity’s workflows, and created solutions to match. These were primarily ProBuilder, a level design and 3D modeling tool, and ProGrids, a simple-yet-powerful snapping and alignment feature. These were highly successful on the Asset Store, and led to us being hired to work directly at Unity.

Various, Independent: May 2010 – Current.  Initial prototype and design for Mak. Continuous discussion and advising for indie studios using ProBuilder. Led design on 2 Meta XR hackathons, won each (Submersed, Pencil!). Submitted pitches for and won 2 Meta XR tool-app grants (PolysketchVR, DIY Helper). Presented at Level Design Workflows at GDC and Contextual Tooling Design at Unite.

Studio2A, 3D Artist and Engineer: February 2009 – July 2012. As an architectural visualization artist, I built and rendered photo-realistic models and scenes for structures, products, and educational materials. This is also where I began my problem-solving career, building custom tools for Studio2A to work more effectively.

Person

I take an unconventional approach to product design, leveraging my personal experience and interacting directly with users. Personal bias is a danger, I attribute my success to tempering every design with “how would I teach this?”, leaning into empathy built over many years of teaching and presenting. Finally, simple but effective, I work hard to build trust, respect, and genuine friendship in my teams.