- I got a promotion recently at work.
It's very exciting.
I'm moving up from a level three to a level four
on our internal manager matrix.
It comes with a nice bump in salary.
Also means I'm expected to perform at a higher level.
But this promotion got me thinking
about my design career so far,
all the different places I've worked,
the different roles I've had,
as well as the choices that I've made throughout my career
to get to where I am today,
which is working as the creative director
at a remote tech company.
Today I wanna take you on a little trip
down my design career memory lane
and reveal to you all the different places that I've worked
and roles that I've had.
I'm gonna show you some of the work that I did
in each of these roles.
Some of it's gonna be very cringey, so be prepared.
And also tell you about the choices I made
of when to move on from a role
and what to move on to.
And to do this, to properly take you through this history,
I've prepared a visual aid,
so please hold while I grab it.
(laid-back music)
Tada. (laughs)
Look, I wanted to do this on a blank white wall,
but, I mean, you've seen my office.
It's full of art.
Blank wall doesn't exist in here where I have my camera
and my lighting.
So this is a makeshift sound dampener
that we have in our house,
and I have used up all my printer ink
printing out the companies that I've worked at.
Let's get started, shall we?
(laid-back music)
So to give you just a little bit of background,
I graduated from Massey University in Wellington in 2011
with a bachelor of design with first class honors.
I majored in visual communication design
and focused on graphic design within that.
And I actually got my first paying design job
in my final year of university,
so let's reveal our first logo.
I spent my last year working at...
How is this gonna work?
(laughs) (drum roll)
Baby Star.
This was a local New Zealand company
that sold baby supplies, clothes, cribs,
other stuff that babies need.
Clearly I don't have kids.
I started working here in 2011 just as a retail assistant.
Retail jobs is what I worked all throughout university.
In the last few years of high school, as well.
This was just a small local business.
There was someone on the team who ran the email newsletter,
and when they left,
the managers, the owners of Baby Star asked
if I might be interested in taking over
doing some of that design work
'cause they knew that I was studying for a design degree.
I was, of course, ecstatic.
Jumped at the chance to do this.
Perhaps jumped a little bit too quickly,
'cause I ended up doing this work just for my same rate
as my retail pay.
I know now that I probably should've charged a higher rate
for that design work using that specialized skill
rather than my work being on the shop floor.
But hey, I was still getting paid,
and I designed a bunch of things like this,
like ads, booklets,
images for email newsletters that were very inaccessible
'cause they were literally put in there as a JPEG.
None of this work is particularly great,
but it was a lot of fun
and a very low stakes environment to be doing client work.
There was a little bit of overlap in my final year
of university between Baby Star and my next job,
which was at Mitsubishi Electric.
Actually, it was technically at a company called BDT,
but Mitsubishi Electric was the brand that we sold
and what I was designing for,
and I figured that it was a company
you were more likely to know.
Specifically, Mitsubishi Electric makes things like fridges
and heat pumps, dehumidifiers,
that sort of thing.
I applied for this job through our university forums.
They were looking for a part-time designer.
Having had a little taste of being paid for design work
at Baby Star,
I was stoked to try and get more of that,
so I applied.
Hey, Sam just turned the light on.
How did you do that?
I took a little bit longer
than the average student to do my bachelor of design degree.
I took some time off after my second year,
which meant that I spread the work
over five years instead of four,
and that meant that in the second half of 2011,
I had a very light class load.
I actually only had one class that I had to go to
and the rest was working on my project,
which was a lot of work.
But I managed to fit in working 30 hours a week,
I think, in this job as a part-time graphic designer.
I definitely usually count this as my first design job
because it was the first one where it was like,
my whole role was there to be a designer, right?
I had my own desk in the office,
which was really exciting to me.
I had a commute, which also felt exciting at the time,
even though I spent a lot of my wages
on the bus journey there and back,
'cause I had to go from Wellington to Lower Hutt
to get to the office each day.
So yeah, my last semester of university,
I was doing my major project.
I was doing freelance design work at Baby Star,
sometimes working on the shop floor on the weekends,
also going on the weekdays to Mitsubishi Electric.
It was a busy time.
When I finished my classes,
almost immediately, BDT,
Mitsubishi Electric offered me a full-time job,
which I jumped at the chance to accept.
I was loving the work I was doing there,
really enjoying being part of the team.
I was very confused that some of my university classmates
turned their nose up at this job.
They'd seen it on the forums, too,
and I think it's 'cause it wasn't the big fancy agency
that they were going after
or that they wanted to do an internship at.
But I was just excited to have a job
and be being paid to create stuff in Photoshop every day,
and so, yeah, this was great.
I firmly believe in going after your dreams,
but having worked here part-time for a while,
I could see that it was gonna be a great first job for me,
and so yeah, I jumped at it.
So I worked full-time in this job for about a year.
Then at the end of 2012,
I started to get a sense that it might be time
for me to move on.
The main thing was that I felt like
I wanted to be working on web design
or digital design as my core workload,
and that just wasn't needed at Mitsubishi Electric.
I got to work on a couple digital things,
but I knew that the majority of my job
would always be print work,
and I just saw web design as the future
and what I wanted to move into.
So I started keeping my eye out
for more web design focused jobs.
Ended up in a role at Xero.
Oh, dear.
Xero is an accounting software company,
and it's kind of the tech company darling of New Zealand.
Definitely the biggest tech company in the country still,
I'm pretty sure.
When I applied for this job,
the only web design examples I had were,
one, my portfolio itself.
I was like, yeah, look at how I designed
my own own portfolio.
And then two, the design for my own
clothing company website,
which looked very similar to my portfolio.
Somehow, though, still got the job.
They must've seen something in me.
Very grateful for that.
I was the third marketing design hire to join the team,
and this was actually the first role
where I learned the term marketing designer
and learned that this is a thing in tech.
Designers on the marketing team have this title.
Clearly you know how that turned out.
I think this was a great next step for me
because the team was bigger.
There was only three of us
on marketing design when I started,
but there was more on the product design side,
and also the company grew really quickly.
There was a lot more marketing designers on the team
who joined throughout my time there.
I got to work on a lot of web design projects here,
lots of landing pages for xero.com
or designing site sections.
I also got to design for Xerocon,
which was a conference Xero put on,
and I even won an award for this website here
that I designed for Xerocon.
Very cool.
So I was definitely right about this being a role
that there was a lot of room for me to grow
and try new things,
get a lot of work done.
I'd also heard really good things about the company
from a friend who worked there
and I knew it was a proper tech company
that had a ping-pong table
and a barista in the office.
It was pretty cool.
My next move came a little more than two years later
when I moved to London in 2015
but my next job was at Xero again.
(record scratches)
Tricked you. (laughs)
I've put this as a separate role, though,
because I got to transfer offices from the HQ in Wellington
to working at the London office of Xero,
which was great.
Made that move to London a lot easier
knowing I had a job there to walk into.
Very quickly, though,
I noticed that I did not like this job
of working at Xero in London as much as I had liked it
working at Xero in New Zealand.
It just felt a lot different being outside of the HQ.
There was a lot of important design decisions
I missed out on just from not being there.
I also got passed over for a promotion.
They started instituting an official layer
of senior designers,
and people had been referring to me as a senior designer
in the six months previous,
but I was told that because I was in London,
I couldn't be a senior designer
and lead projects and things because of my time zone.
Naturally, I was not stoked about that,
and so I decided that I was gonna start looking around
for a role where I could have more responsibility
and have more ownership.
So after a total of, I think it was two years,
nine months at Xero across the different offices,
just six months in London,
I moved on to a London-based company called...
Oh no, this again.
Here we go, Edited, yay!
Edited is a fashion tech company.
They look at analytics of what's selling, what's not,
on lots of different retailers' websites
and present reports and things.
Fashion brands use them to figure out what to buy,
what to invest in.
I'm forgetting the sales pitch 'cause it's been a while.
(laughs)
But this was a company that I actually had my eye on
before I moved to London,
before I knew that I could stick with Xero
and transfer to the London office.
I love fashion.
Not that you can really tell
by the fact that I'm just wearing McLaren merch right now.
But I was excited to have people who work in fashion
as the target audience
that I was designing marketing materials for,
because, yeah, I forgot to say,
I was still a marketing designer at Edited.
Kept that same title, was working in that same role.
This was a much smaller company than Xero.
When I started at Xero,
I think we were 200, 300 people globally,
and when I left it was 1500,
so it had gotten very big.
Edited was more like maybe 60 people when I joined.
Maybe less, I don't know now.
I think I did a lot of great work here,
but I was starting to get burnt out by the London commute.
It would take me an hour each way
to go to and from the office to where I lived,
and doing that alongside running my YouTube channel
and starting to get into this business that I run now was,
it was a lot.
I was starting to get a bit burnt out.
Which is why when an opportunity came up
to work at a remote company,
I was very interested in it quite quickly.
So after being at Edited for a little over
a year and a half,
I moved on to (drum roll)
ConvertKit!
Why do I put on an American accent when I say it like that?
(laughs)
I met Nathan, the CEO of ConvertKit, our founder,
at a conference in 2016, I believe it was.
At the time, they had just one full-time designer
on the team who was working on both designing the product
and designing the marketing website
and any sort of other brand and marketing materials,
and so he brought me on to take over that side of things.
The whole company was only maybe 25 people
or something like that when I joined,
and our marketing team at one point was just me,
our marketing director, and our writer.
So I'd gone from smaller businesses to a bigger one
and then back down smaller again.
I was working on all sorts of projects,
from the marketing website
to even coding the marketing website at one point.
I'm so glad I don't have to do that anymore.
Designing for our event, Craft and Commerce.
Also got to work on a lot of ads,
including partnering with an agency on producing
some fancy brand ads.
Four years was a long time to stay in one role,
but like I said,
I had a promotion at one point,
and ConvertKit was good at giving raises often,
so I felt like I had a sense of progress most of the time.
But after four years in this role,
I did start to feel a little bit listless,
a little bit like I wanted more of a challenge.
I didn't know what was next,
and I just had this overwhelming sense
that I perhaps wasn't living out my full potential.
I wanted more responsibility and more ownership.
I wanted to be able to have more impact than I was having
in my current role.
And luckily for me,
I did not have to go far to search for the next role,
which brings us to today,
where I am again still at ConvertKit,
but as creative director now.
This definitely counts as a different step
in my design career because it is a different role
and it was a choice to step into it
and also to step into it at ConvertKit
rather than going elsewhere.
I lead a team now.
I lead our brand studio team.
Got to hire a designer.
So I'm not the only marketing designer
at ConvertKit anymore.
This change happened in October 2020,
which, as we all know,
was a very difficult year
and a difficult time to be thinking
about making a transition,
but I felt like staying at ConvertKit
and learning about management,
learning how to lead a team
and what it means to be a creative director
in this super supportive environment
with a team that I already knew
and knew I loved working with
doing work that I already knew I was really interested in
with our target audience being creators.
It's a lot of fun for me.
Yeah, that made that the right next choice in my career.
I've been in this role for the past two years,
and I will say that there was a point during it
where I wasn't sure if it was the right fit for me.
I think that's probably a story for another time,
perhaps another the video.
But yeah, we'd never had a creative director
before at ConvertKit,
and it just took us a bit to settle into what I should
and shouldn't be responsible for
and how I could have the most impact.
But I'm really happy with my role where it is now,
especially after being promoted.
(laughs)
I think this is a really good fit
for the stage of my career where I'm leading a team
and getting to learn more about the growth
and people management development side of things
as well as the brand development side of things
and how can I create better design systems
and improve the perception and quality of our brand overall.
I'm definitely being challenged.
I get to do a lot of cool stuff,
definitely have a lot of impact,
and I definitely also have
a lot of ownership and responsibility,
which, as you've probably seen,
is a theme throughout this video,
is a thing that I definitely look for in a career.
Maybe I should've put another question mark here
to be like, what's next?
But the truth is I don't know what's next.
I'm really happy here in this stage of my career for now
and I will continue to fill you in
as my design career develops.
If you've got any questions about any of these roles
or the choices that I made in my career,
please feel free to ask 'em in the comments.
Perhaps we can do a separate design career path Q&A video.
I'm sure some of you are wondering
why I haven't gone full-time freelance
or worked in an agency
or become a product designer or things like that.
Thank you for watching, though,
and I know it doesn't have the most up-to-date information,
but if you're interested to know what I got paid
at these different roles that I've had throughout my career,
then you can go watch this video over here
about my salary history.
It's a couple years old now,
but it covers most things,
and I hope you enjoy it.
Thanks for watching.
Bye.
(laid-back music)