Being a brand designer! Part 1
- Hey everyone. I've got a special guest today. This is Ryan. Ryan works at Webflow, and he is the brand designer there which is similar to what I do at ConvertKit as the marketing designer. Now I don't know many other people who have this job, like the same thing that I do, so we're gonna talk about it today, it's gonna be great, we're in the Webflow studio so everything's looking a lot more professional than usual. (upbeat chill instrumental) So Ryan, why brand design? Why did you choose to do that and not product design or UX and all these other design folks that I feel like most people gravitate towards. - Most people do. It was really easy for me. I came from art side. I secretly think that people who do product design wish they were doing more creative work something. - I like to think that too. - I was applying for jobs, I was looking around here and there was a ton of project design rules, and very few that were brand or marketing related, but, I just, I like, I'm gonna have way more fun doing this kind of stuff. When I have to, you know, sit down and solve a complex problem, some of our designers do, it's fun, it's interesting to me and it's a challenge, but I have a lot more fun doing illustration, making these look really great, working on like video projects, like, that's just what I enjoy more. - Yeah, I think the exact same thing. I think it's more fun to do brand design. - Yeah, it's very selfish. (chuckling) - Yeah, especially when you're working in house though, I think you can get bored quite easily, it would easy to anyway, I could see how people would get bored, but when you're doing what we do we can make things a lot more interesting, like we've got more freedom for trying new things each project than someone working on the product does because like, obviously all of that needs to feel very cohesive. - Totally. I'm the brand design lead, I get to work on a brand that's my focus is evolving that. So if I do get kind of bored, I get to change that for myself and change it for us, and you know, as we grow and evolve with the company, the brand evolves and grows too. I've worked at an agency and enjoyed that kind of freedom, but I'm enjoying this a lot more. - Cool, okay, so that was gonna be another one of my questions is what kind of design work have you done previously and did you try out before settling on marketing design? - I've worked both at start ups and agencies. My first job out of high school was like a very small start up, I was 17, and I was the only designer and my boss had three companies. - Wow. - So I was like, I was doing all of the marketing and brand design for all three and it was really fun like it was, it sounds like a lot, but it was just like, I was just, I didn't know what I was doing, I was 17 just like making things look fun, but I got to learn a lot. That was a chance for me to fail and to go from not wanting to touch code ever to being like oh this is accessible, like the first site I ever did I was like trying to animate it and stuff like that, you know. - Sweet. - I was always freelancing too, I was doing print work and logos and stuff like that, never anything too big. Then after that I went to an agency. And, I was most of the time there working on the Samsung team so it was kind of like being in house but there was still the vibes of doing a lot of different, it was agency life and doing a lot of different things at different times. Got to work on like our own branding and some other projects and stuff like that. And while I worked there, I also worked as like a project designer freelancing for a startup in town and that was when I worked on an iPad app. It was fun, but it was like going from making these creative pages, or, you know, just really creative work, to caring about the system of things and user researcher and things like that, but at that point I kind of saw that as like the future of where I needed to go. And for my next job I was assuming it would be product and I was kind of like sad about it. (laughing) But yeah, then I landed here. - That's great, so it saved you from that. - I literally, it saved me from that yeah. I had an offer from a product, like product role and an offer for this role and I was just like it was really easy. - I don't know if you feel this too but I sometimes feel like in the tech world, marketing design, brand design is looked down upon by product designers. - Yeah. - And I don't know if that's just like, I don't know, my own insecurities coming out but I just get that sense. So it's really cool to get someone else who actively chooses to work on brand design. - Yes, it funny, like, I don't think anyone's being mean by it. - No. - It's just design in its root is solving problems, right and I think it's really easy to look at someone that worked as product designers, you know, whether it's digital or physical, my fiance's an architect and is building buildings, right? That all to me is like that's really cool but I think I'm solving a different problem and it's more artistic and that's okay. I came from drawing, that was what I liked to do, I just kind of found where I could do a little bit of that. Product design has more weight to it. You know, it's more expected I think by more people. I would say, cause I am hiring a lot, like it is hard to find marketing and brand designers, especially here in the city cause a lot of people just assume they need to go into the product world. - Yep, I wanna know about your process of working on your brand design projects. First of all what are the main things that you work on. Is it mostly like landing pages? - Launch, landing pages are like my favorite thing. It's kind of like the opportunity to really flex and stray away from the main branding. And, you know, it can be an evolution or a version of it and that's fine. What else do I do, I do, so there's a lot of work to be done on our main marketing site. We're trying to grow that a lot.
https://youtu.be/nGSszoFSWV8