issuu : CREATIVE DIRECTOR BRAND + UX

Dream Job #5 – Off the Mecca

With our UX team of four supporting 50 engineers and product marketing efforts, we had to work smart and create good systems. We were responsible for all aspects of the UX/UI: from research, to user testing, to final skin. 

July 2014 - June 2017 {Copenhagen, Denmark}

THE STORY

Though I was happy working as contractor for Apple my commute from Los Angeles to Cupertino was starting to wear me and my family down. We decided to pack up and move back to the Bay Area with the aim of saving money so that we could eventually move to a Spanish-speaking country and give our two daughters an international experience. Which was when the opportunity at issuu materialized. And so we found ourselves moving to Scandinavia; to the one of the world's most desirable cities and home to the happiest people in the world.

The transition was not without stress, but the issuu team is one of the most well-balanced, talented groups of people I have met. Always inspiring, the flexible hours and cross-functional team model created an ideal work environment. As creative director I worked closely with the design team and front-end developers to put into place a UI library to help with production velocity, leading us to launch the company's first design sprint. 

EAT YOUR OWN DOG FOOD

One of the fundamentals in design is to eat your own dog food. At issuu we started off with a bang, building ourselves up by using in-house brand guidelines and promoting our initial publications. One of those publications was Orange Juice, which looked at how the product team transitioned the digital platform, with millions of daily users, from legacy flash to HTML5. 

GET IT TO MARKET

Marketing at issuu had it's own set of challenges. With a very tight budget, the UX team and primary me as the lead also had marketing collateral as part of our product deliverables. The upside of this is we had consistency in messaging and concept from beginning to end, the down side was that it's busy. I took on the responsibilities of the work that fell outside of the delivery team structure to make sure my UX team had focus on their customer.

THE JOB

There were many day to day duties around being a brand ambassador that I was happy to champion alone with Director role tasks:

• Managed UX team.
• UX/UI Designer for the Agile Growth Delivery Team.
• Worked with Frontend Developers and UX team to create UI system to increase production velocity and consistency across platforms.
• Introduced design sprints, and encouraged a culture of prototyping and testing.
• Creative Direction and Design of Marketing Materials and visual Marketing Interns.
• Internally created brand guidelines for brand growth and consistency.