Designing Products and Building Brands for Startups
I grew up with a severe font obsession that drove my family nuts 🙅🏻🙅🏻🙅🏻🙄🙄. Thankfully, it all seems less crazy today.
While I was always very passionate about the design of everything, I pursued marketing in college. Throughout school, I meddled around in Photoshop👩🏻💻 while designing approximately 2,719 t-shirts 😬. After school, I flew across the globe to Startup Nation, where I took a gig as a marketer and—because we were a 7-person team I defaulted to—designer.
I ended up falling into product design, which for me was a perfect intersection of design, marketing, and problem solving 👌🕺🏻😍.
((Fast forward a few years: the startup was acquired 🤝, I spent a year freelancing 🐿 for some amazing people at various businesses and scrappy startups 🚀, and then moved to New York City 🇺🇸.))
I’m currently designing products for commerce marketers with an awesome team of people at Bluecore. When I’m not spending my time in Sketch 💎, I’m having dance parties with my daughter 👯 or playing hungry tourist in NYC 🗽🍕🍉🍔🍪🍫🥑.
Product Design
I’m passionate about designing products that will change people’s everyday, especially at work. B2B software is notorious for not emphasizing design or user experience. There should be no difference in caliber of experience between B2B and B2C products, because after all, we’re designing products for people.
Design as a Differentiator at a B2B Company @ FirstMark Capital’s Design Driven:
Branding
I love transforming a company’s internal identity into a brand that speaks to the rest of the world. The collaborative nature of developing a brand identity is extremely rewarding. It all begins with the team diving into what the company stands for and how it would like to be positioned in the market. That then turns into a bunch of brainstorms and iterations, allowing us to hone in on the perfect brand.
Visual Design
I like to think of visual design as the entire package, branding every customer and prospect touchpoint: from website to sales decks, from one pagers to reports, and from fundraise pitches to infographics.