Time to do a quick post to reflect on what I’ve been doing at work…
Designing
At ClearGraph, I’m the only designer thus it falls to me to make designs for lots of things.
- App Design: Flows, interaction and visual design for our main analytics app. One challenge is trying to define our brand yet also building in the flexibility to white-label or embed our app. Some of the more daring design choices can’t be used because it won’t meld with another company’s visual identity. I primarily use Sketch and InVision.
- Motion design: We need to do product videos to help sell our product. I use Premiere and After Effects to edit the videos with Pond5 stock music to go behind our voice-over.
- Hard goods: business cards, t-shirts, stickers, trade-show backdrops, pricing sheets. I am a sucker for Moo’s spot gloss.
Writing
I’m a bit surprised by the amount of writing that I do as a part of my job. Since marketing has become one of my responsibilities, I’ve been forced to substantially increase the amount I write. (Previously, I couldn’t tell the difference between marketing and sales. Now I think of it as: Marketing = effort to get people to hear about and contact us. They’d become a “lead”. Sales = effort to take leads and then convert them into paying customers.)
- Essential communication: email, chat (Slack), code review, project descriptions (task management)
- Product Blog posts: public feature announcements/walk-throughs in the ClearGraph Blog
- Social Media: Twitter, Facebook, Linked In, email newsletter. Basically have to notify people that a blog post has happened.
- ClearGraph Website, App, and marketing materials: It’s interesting how difficult it is to write error messages with good tone. (I dislike “Oops” in errors – makes light of an error and doesn’t come off as empathetic)
- Help Center: Gotta give help for all the things. FYI – Support articles should be short, clear and accurate.
Programming
This year I’ve done a lot less programming. We’ve been doing a lot more back-end, infrastructure work so the front-end stuff I’d hop in to help with is a lot more limited. That being said, I still try to keep up by learning a few new skills in the code-world.
- SVG: lots of cool things going on here. Working to move away from icon fonts to SVG. Also doing more animating SVG using CSS.
- D3: Starting to finally tinker with D3 as a way of visualizing data in svg using js. Specifically looking at the tree graph and force graphs.
- CSS: I’ve been working a lot with SASS, but I’m keeping a really close eye on the compatibility charts with CSS grid and CSS variables (oh and position: sticky!). As soon as there’s strong coverage across the board, we’ll put those properties to use.
Teaching
I stopped teaching at Academy of Art University. I had fun guiding students, but I felt too pressed for time regarding homework review and updating class materials. My last semester was interesting though – I tried using github and cloud9 for editing and turning in. There were some hiccups like filesize limits on github pushes, but overall was pretty successful as a free platform setup for coding.
On another note, I’ve gotten a couple of interview requests from early UC Davis design students. I love helping out students, but I also wonder what kind of things they’re looking for. I wish I could offer more entry level jobs to help them along.