(gentle music)
- Something I often talk about in my videos
is about brand and marketing design
and how it's different from product design.
I'm very passionate about it,
but even though these are separate roles,
most of the time anyway, in a tech company,
marketing and product designers
still need to work together, after all,
we need to make sure that our user signing up
on the marketing site and then logging into the product,
feels a sense of consistency
and like they haven't accidentally gone to the wrong site,
because it looks totally different
to what they were just seeing before.
Brand consistency builds trust.
So we asked marketing and brand designers
need to work with product designers
to infuse brand into the product.
In my recent interview with Stuart Scott Curran,
who is the senior director of brand for Loom,
he shared with me how the brand
and product design teams at Loom
stay in sync with each other and how they make
infusing brand and the product
a really natural part of their process.
So it becomes just like not a big deal.
This is what he had to say as part of his answer
to a question I asked him about his team's responsibilities.
- Part of that comes with collaborating on products
and making sure that we have brands infused
into products and vice versa.
That's less of like what we work on and more just like
that's always on and what we do.
And we can do that by having regular meetings
through the week, it's not necessarily like, okay,
we have this project now,
we're just always trying to try and keep that on.
- Right, like it's a responsibility for your team
rather than a project.
It's just like you're always responsible for it,
whenever you're giving a critique to product,
you're giving suggestions or like making sure
that the brand visuals and voice is expressed through that.
- And uncovering opportunities where the two
can mesh better, you know, and that's not always
visual design, sometimes that's just like a tweak
to copywriting in the product,
you know, like something that we've been,
tooling with on the marketing side,
maybe we wanna bring in
some of that tone of voice to the product too.
We try and keep it to like a million little things,
you know, that all kind of like add up
to hopefully something bigger, rather than, okay.
We have a project now and we wanna bring brand
into product, you know, like we and keep it
a little bit more natural and organic.
- Yeah, and I feel like maybe that's the way
to actually make it happen as well, you know,
because if it was a big project where I don't know
it's gonna take awhile,
you gotta spend the time planning it.
It'd be easy to deprioritize it in comparison
to other things perhaps that marketing needs.
But when it's just like you said, a million little things,
you can fit them in easier and just slowly over time,
you get more and more of the brand and the product.
- I mean, I've certainly had trouble before
at previous companies with brands and product collaboration,
just because the timelines are different.
Everybody's workload is different,
the priorities are different.
And, whenever we find an opportunity
to do something and product,
maybe they are focused on something else
and it becomes this kind of game of tennis
where you're just throwing something back and forward
over the net and never really landing
on anything that feels great.
So we wanted to try and avoid that.
And for us, the way to do that
is to just remove the idea of it being a project.
You know, like it's more just something
that we try and bake into the DNA
of our design culture, which is just like, you know,
one of our company values is lead with transparency.
And so all of our Slack channels are completely open.
All of the work in progress just gets posted,
anybody can follow along that wants to see that,
we have twice a week where we come together.
And so hopefully we just have this kind of like
background noise of sheer work
somewhat ambiently, you know,
where folks are able to pick up on things
and spin up conversations
on where we can potentially collaborate.
And that's hopefully something
that's happening continuously over team rather than, okay,
this quarter we're gonna work on X, you know.
- I really love this concept of doing
a million little things
instead of making it one big project.
Not only does that feel like it will build the habit more
for all of the designers and make it
that natural part of the process.
But also honestly, it feels less overwhelming
to get started with than planning a big project
around infusing brand into the product.
And this is something I definitely wanna work on more
with the product design team at ConvertKit.
And I think we'll take this approach too,
of lots of little things, rather than making it a big deal,
doing a big project planning and things like that.
We just, we need it to be a habit.
The full interview that I did with Stuart
is filled with lots of useful insights,
not only about this brand and product situation,
but also about the rebrand process that the Loom team
went through internally recently as well.
So you should check that out right here
and share your thoughts in the comments.
I'll see you over there.