Hi, I’m Maria Duran.
I’m a designer based in Chicago, born in Mazatlan, SinaIoa. When I’m not too busy designing, I love spending my time learning a new skill or making new memories. I have experience in Branding, Illustration and UX/UI. Let’s work together.
Quick fact: I love to draw & paint
Words from collaborators
Jordan Diab
Maria Duran is a talented creative, collaborator, and team-player. You'd be hard-pressed to find a better graphic designer. I worked as her copywriting partner for almost two years at University of Phoenix. Her intelligence and creativity pervade all aspects of her work: brainstorming, concepting, presenting, and problem-solving. She listens to others and responds to different approaches respectfully and thoughtfully. Maria's portfolio speaks to her ability to design for various brands and tones — from silly and bold to serious and informative.
Copywriting Partner at University of Phoenix
Amy Sorlie
Maria is an incredibly talented artist and graphic designer. I had the pleasure of having her on my team where she immediately made a tremendous impact. Her designs up-leveled our content and provided a cohesive look and feel to everything. Her designs are incredibly creative and fun. Maria is so organized and turns around amazing designs in record time. She is quick, easy to work with, collaborative, and consistently performs at a high level. She also took on creating landing pages from scratch and learned Elementor in record time. I'd work with Maria again in a heartbeat! She's an asset to any team.
Director of Content Strategy at AdAction
I had the pleasure of managing Maria during her time as a Product Designer on the SP2 team at Super.com, and I can confidently say she was one of the strongest designers on our team.
Maria consistently brought a customer-first mindset, pairing thoughtful UX research with strong interaction and visual design. She has a knack for clarifying ambiguous problems, quickly turning loose ideas into concrete, testable concepts and polished end-to-end flows. On SP2, she played a key role in shaping experiences that balanced user needs with complex technical and business constraints.
What stood out most was how collaborative and ownership-driven Maria is. She worked seamlessly with PMs, engineers, and data partners, actively seeking feedback and incorporating it without losing the core design vision. When we were under tight deadlines, Maria was the one who stayed calm, organized, and focused on outcomes: driving alignment, documenting decisions, and ensuring we shipped with quality.
Beyond her craft, Maria is simply great to work with: proactive, thoughtful in her communication, and always willing to step up where the team needs her most. I would gladly work with her again, and I highly recommend Maria for any product design role where strong UX thinking, collaboration, and execution are valued.
Lead Engineer at Super.com