Zapier
Zapier is a web-based automation tool that connects a vast array of apps, automating all the little annoyances in your life. I joined the company way back in 2017 (employee #99!), starting as a product designer and eventually becoming their founding brand designer. Below is a small smorgasbord of projects from my ~5 years there.
Timeline
Start — Aug 2017
Depart — Dec 2021
Scope
So much stuff y’all
Zapier
Zapier is a web-based automation tool that connects a vast array of apps, automating all the little annoyances in your life. I joined the company way back in 2017 (employee #99!), starting as a product designer and eventually becoming their founding brand designer. Below is a small smorgasbord of projects from my ~5 years there.
Timeline
Start — Aug 2017
Depart — Dec 2021
Scope
So much stuff y’all
Zapier
Zapier is a web-based automation tool that connects a vast array of apps, automating all the little annoyances in your life. I joined the company way back in 2017 (employee #99!), starting as a product designer and eventually becoming their founding brand designer. Below is a small smorgasbord of projects from my ~5 years there.
Timeline
Start — Aug 2017
Depart — Dec 2021
Scope
So much stuff y’all
The marketing team had grown to the point of needing full-time design support, which I saw as an opportunity to establish the company’s first-ever brand design team.
Advocacy and education for what brand is, and can do, were by far my biggest responsibilities at the start (and a lot of lurking in Slack channels). This translated to writing and socializing a team "charter", launching an intake process, developing countless templates, and even self-serve design systems — all in the name of removing design as a bottleneck.
Of all the systems I created, email was by far my fave due to the close collaboration with Ops (s/o Sean). Going rogue, we developed a system that reduced build time from 2 weeks to 1 day, and design requests 52% to 5%.
Besides a logo, orange, and a typeface, there was little else in terms of brand identity. Heck, there weren’t even brand guidelines. This meant that any project, be it product or marketing, was at the whim of the designer, leaving a scattered impression.
One of the first steps was to create some kind of brand guidelines to unite the team.
The new brand guidelines helped, but there was a serious lack of personality. A rebrand had been discussed, but never solidified. I proposed and developed an “interim” brand identity as a stopgap.
I started with creative directions centered around the idea of what Zapier would be as a person:
Amazingly, when we finally did rebrand the company my proposed direction was eerily similar to where we landed:
Hobbes, a phenomenal motion studio, was hired to create a motion toolkit for our burgeoning tutorial ecosystem (called Zapier University). I served as the design lead, working super closely with the video team (s/o David and Joey).
We saw an opportunity to create a “What is Zapier” video to serve as an intro for new users and boy did they deliver! Unfortunately, our then-CMO didn’t like it, and it has sat on the shelf ever since. ☹️
