- 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.
- Yeah, that's where I spend most of my time is
on our main marketing site, yeah.
- I think I'm writing a site, it does well,
but we wanna do a lot more to it.
- Yeah.
- You know, we're releasing e-commerce in a few weeks
and with that comes with a feature page
and it comes updating every other part of the site.
- Yeah, all the screenshots, yeah.
- All the screenshots, yeah,
we're updating our UI, we have to update all of that,
and, you know, with this new page that we're working on
it's like well should really update these other ones
if we do this one.
- Yep, and it just turns into a whole refresher
of the whole site.
- Yeah, and then, with that we're doing a video,
so we're working with a contract agency
to produce this launch video,
we're all working really hard on that.
Lot of work to be done on our blog,
there's a lot of like side programs we have.
There's a lot we're always working on.
- Is it mostly digital for you though?
Do you ever do any of the like print or like swag stuff?
- You know, I really want to, I would love to take a week
and just make swag, but just don't have the time right now.
- Just doesn't become the priority, right,
when it's a whole saturated line.
- Yeah, we recently had to make a banner
and some flyers for a conference.
And that was like oh yeah CMYK is a thing.
- Yep, you gotta go back to it.
- So there's a very small amount of that,
but yeah, a little bit,
I think that's more typical for brand designers.
Especially as I look around and look at the work
of people that call themselves brand designers.
It's a lot of internal, I think marketing related,
but usually a lot of internal
swag related and illustrations.
Me and my team do a lot less of that type of work.
- Right.
- But there's a project we wanna do really badly
and we got close to doing it
for the launch of e-commerce where we
were actually gonna produce our own swag store.
- Oh my gosh, that's such a good idea.
- So it's like, it serves a lot of purposes.
- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- One it's, a lot of people ask for Webflow t-shirts
and pens and stickers all the time,
and we're like yeah, sure, here, take it, you know.
And then we do have like events,
it's hard to organize, you know, getting all that swag
in the instant and all that,
at the same time we're producing an e-commerce products
and we, very few of us have run an e-commerce store.
- Right, so this would be good practice for you all.
- Exactly, so it's a test for us internally.
- Yep.
- To really even find the pinpoints
and be able to mark it towards those and talk to
product, be like hey, this was hard, let's fix this,
you know, so it's gonna be really fun too,
cause then we'll just get to make a bunch
of crazy shirts and stickers and all that.
- Yeah, that's cool.
So with projects like that, that was
you and your team come up with the idea for it
and do you have a lot of freedom in that
in suggesting the projects that you work on essentially?
- Absolutely. - Yeah.
- There's absolutely, you know,
we're a design focused company.
As a designer here there's a lot of respect that goes on
and everyone's really supportive of the ideas that we have.
- That's cool.
- I come up with a lot of crazy ideas.
Not all of them are feasible or fit in with the timeline
of what we wanna get done, but there's always support
to at least explore the idea or put it
in the backlog or whatever,
but like this one, you know,
there's other things that took priority, but.
- But you know it's safe for later.
- But it's safe, yeah, it's gonna come.
- Yeah, I do a similar thing at ConvertKit
when in my marketing design work
I can always feel free to suggest how I think
is the best way to solve this problem, you know,
cause it is a problem,
how do we market this feature or whatever.
- Totally.
- Sometimes there's time for it,
sometimes there's not, but yeah,
I think it's great when we can have the freedom
to suggest things like that.
- Totally, I think the best ideas come of like,
all right, let's random thought in a meeting,
I'm just gonna share it, and you know,
if there's a culture of that being out of place
or a culture where that's not supported and encouraged
then you're gonna lose a lot of good ideas.
- Yeah.
- And so everyone here's always like
yeah that's cool let's see what we can do with that.
And I love that.
- Yeah, I love that too.
- I think that that's something that makes
for a really successful in house designer in general
is when you're not just doing the work
that someone asks of you,
but you're coming up with your own ideas as well,
and suggesting things.
- Totally, like when we released the ability
to search within a Webflow site, we created a
essentially Google for dogs, and it was Kibble,
and it would like look like Google, acted like it,
you could search for stuff, you'd get articles
that were like tailored towards dogs,
it was just, yeah, just stuff like that
where we were like hey, let's just do something fun
and it'll take a week or whatever.
- Yeah, do you wanna show me some of your favorite,
I don't know, like what are you working on now
or some of your favorite projects?
- Okay, I'll show you what I'm working on now.
- Yep.
- It's the e-commerce feature page.
Coming soon.
- It'll probably be out by the time
this video goes out actually.
- Okay, it's live, here's the URL.
This is the e-commerce feature page, work in progress,
there's a heal that's not done.
But our main focus with the page is talking about design
cause that's really our largest selling point
is all the things we can do with that.
So there's six sections, which, this one's done.
- Oo, that's cool.
- It's talking about the checkout.
It's really rare, I've experienced this
both shopping a lot online but shopping
on an e-commerce store now built by Webflow
where you're like oh yeah the checkout
always looks terrible and doesn't match anything.
- And it always looks the same on every e-commerce
site you go to as well.
- Exactly, it's like being able to have a custom
like checkout, like yeah that's cool
and now that I'm experiencing I'm like oh wow,
that's really nice.
- This cool I love the animation.
- Cause you build out everything you design as well,
obviously, in Webflow.
- And then, talking about the shopping cart.
- Love, oo.
- Customize it, and there's different ways
you can display it.
We get to your product pages,
there's gonna be a video here, it's not done yet.
Here we have.
- I love all this animation, it's so cool.
- This, the shadow kind of popping up there.
- So what's your process with making a learning page
like this, do you have like a copy team or something
give you the content for it first?
- It's definitely a couple rounds back and forth
between copy and design.
- Mm hmm.
- It'll always start with a Word doc, for sure,
and we have a few people that are very good writers
and very good at starting there,
and then kind of once we actually JP
threw this into a sketch file and we started to
play with the layout, and we actually
get to see the content in the design,
it's like oh this is not working as well
and let's see what we can do here.
- Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.
- And over time we wanna change
what we actually show in the page.
So there was a lot of back and forth between
copy and static layout.
I typically, when I designing something
don't use Sketch or Figma or Illustrator or whatever,
I usually just kind of go straight to Webflow,
but it does work well for getting ideas out there quick,
you know, from there we adapted the designs to Webflow,
a lot of it changed, it's almost completely different,
but it was at least a starting point to get us here.
- It's a starting point to have the conversation, right?
- Yeah, totally, and then this was actually really nice
cause we had just started with a very basic layout,
we didn't do anything too fancy,
and then just kind of tested the content structure
across I think 10 users right now,
and then got some really good feedback
as to what they felt was missing,
and you know, what we can do different.
So it's gonna go live already being tested.
- That's great.
Is that usual for you?
Because I was gonna ask you about A/B testing
and user testing, that sort of thing as well.
We do, well not so much right now,
but we have been doing a lot of A/B testing at ConvertKit,
like little pieces on our site,
or sometimes like full pages,
like we did two completely different home pages.
But user testing for me, normally happens
after the page is live.
- Yeah.
- Mostly because I'm like, I don't know,
I feel like I'm always behind our product team
in getting like, you know, they've got a new feature
that's launching and I'm like ah
I've got to get the lining page done.
- Sure.
- Yeah, how does that normally work for you?
- We don't do a lot of A/B testing.
- Okay.
- It's something we wanna do more this year for sure.
A lot of it's usually, we have enough of an idea
of what we need to do that it's gonna,
it's not gonna fail, but it could always be better.
- Yeah, but there isn't any point in testing, I don't think,
unless you're willing to like take the time
to implement results from it as well.
So like when you've got other projects on,
like that's why I said at the moment at ConvertKit
we're not doing much testing
cause there's just so much going on.
- Exactly, we're in a similar spot for sure.
It's unfortunately a luxury to test, I feel like.
- Yeah.
- As designers we like generally know what's gonna work,
and that's usually like yeah, cool, let's do it,
but, testing is something I definitely wanna do more of.
- I think that as brand designers as well,
perhaps our projects are launched on a more regular
cadence than product designers,
so testing is obviously a huge part of product design
like before you launch a feature out to all
these thousands of people, that's really important,
whereas with what we do it's pretty easy
to like make an update to the website
without it like affecting too many people's lives.
- Yeah.
- If you need to change something later on.
- It's a little bit quieter, you know.
- Yeah, exactly.
- Doesn't break anything, not necessarily.
- Which is again, something that I like
about doing my own design.
- And if we do fail, we'll know on Twitter
or wherever else, people are gonna be like hey.
- Yep, someone will tell you,
this link is broken!
- That happens for sure.
- Yep, for sure.
All right, Ryan, thank you so much for sharing all this.
Where can people go to find out more about you?
- Yeah, I've got a website, ryry.io,
r y r y.
- Great URL.
- Yep, there it is.
- Or just like Twitter, I'm slash ryryjmo.
- We'll put that on the screen as well.
- I love following Ryan on Twitter,
would definitely recommend giving him a follow.
- I tweet mostly Webflow stuff, just be warned.
- Oh there we go, yeah, so you're gonna be
like promoted too, the people that want it.
- Yeah.
- But it's interesting stuff,
you get to see all his projects and things like that.
- Thank you for being here Ryan,
this was really great, I hope you enjoyed watching it,
give it a thumbs up if you did and
I will see you in the next video.
Bye!
Just don't get scared and like move too far away.
(laughing)
Thanks Tim.
- Bye, love!
- Bye, I love you!
(laughing)
- I say that more than you'd expect.
(chill instrumental)