2020-2022
Graphics Director
For a smart home décor company, Simply Smart Home
I joined Simply Smart home in 2020 with the primary goal of helping them increase sales through refining their customer-facing experiences and collateral. With the role of Graphics & Web Dev director, my responsibilities include:
- Branding
- Product Packaging
- Product Graphics
- Sales Assets
- App Design
- Website
- Marketing Collateral
- Product Design
IPs include:
IPs include:
After hiring me
Impact
Product sales increased ~230% in 2021, year over year.
I built a new website, replaced our branding to better resonate with our target audiences, created product renders, and implemented that across all our consumer facing collateral and sales funnels. The product itself, and its software, was not changed.
230
Products Sold YOY 2021
8
Launched Products
Process
As a primary stakeholder, I work with our Marketing Director to iterate action items and bring design solution options to other stakeholders for final edits and production approval.
Process is improvisational based on the type of project and stakeholders involved, which gives me operational freedom to design and execute with tactics that work best for me.
To find a critical path for completing any project, my process strategy remains consistent though seeking to understand and make explicit: what a project’s specifications are, what business goals exist, who’s involved, what we’re trying to communicate and to whom.
I keep in mind that everyone is a designer, especially with being able to recognize bad design, when communicating design decisions and iterating items. With agreement on the problem we’re trying to solve, I help my team explore actionable design solutions for consideration.
Lessons
My time at Simply Smart Home has enabled me to grow as a designer through learning new skills, and helping refine the presentation of products on store shelves. I’ve enjoyed both immensely.
Design is a refinement process; refinement creates better results.
At minimum, good enough is a benchmark that works; so does figuring out how to do the bare maximum amount of work for any project. Although, our competition demanded more of us to parody their quality of presentation.
Investing more time in our output helped us meet parody in 2021, and our competition reacted by doing the same and investing time in their presentation; including imitating our marketing collateral and design directionality.
Communicating design rationale is as important as the design solution proposed for successful projects.
With the desired outcome in mind when communicating, I’ve learned that having everyone agree on the problem we’re trying to solve and getting consensuses on the design solution is key to successful projects.
We’re all human, and have perspectives on design based on our everyday experiences with it. My role includes helping my team understand why and how we use design to solve our business problems, along with how their input is apart of creating better outcomes through refinement.