As designers, we spend most of our time working closely within our product teams. Design week is an opportunity to dedicate time away from distractions and focus on bigger opportunities, through collaborative work with designers across the organisation.

“These are sad drawings”, I said to my scene partner, looking down at my empty hands. Those were my closing words from last week’s improv show. I can’t remember what was going through my head at the time. What matters is how I got to that show in the first place.

For most of my life, I called Montreal home. A vibrant cultural scene, seasonal sports and great food made it an awesome place to spend my early 20’s. Like many young professionals, it took me a couple years to really find myself. Realizing Montreal might not be the best place to create the life I envisioned, I moved to Sydney in search of new opportunities, and a warmer climate.

This past year I started working at Canva, one of Australia’s fastest growing startups. Coming from an agency background, I expected things to be different. Flexible hours, a bigger team and inspiring offices were some of the obvious changes. Looking back a year later, there’s a few more things that made it all worth it;

As a UI&UX designer, I spend most days designing websites and apps. Lately, I’ve been doing less and less “design” work. More often than not, I find myself digging through research, sending emails, drafting strategy documents, sharing ideas with my team or reviewing designs with engineers. This means I spend a lot of time writing. With words. So many words. More words than I ever anticipated using when I started my design career almost 10 years ago.

After 7 years working agency side, I'm making the switch and joining one of the fastest growing companies in Sydney! I'm pretty excited 🙂

As designers, we’re responsible for both creating and communicating our design strategy to different stakeholders; creatives, managers, engineers and of course clients. Each of those audiences have different expectations, capabilities and experiences in regards to design. At Webling, we’ve developed strategies and processes to help bridge the gap, However, given the ever-changing nature of our work, we're constantly rethinking how we manage our relationships, our tools and our processes so we can design bigger and better things.

“Your process should be as responsive as the products you are designing.”

Samantha Warren, Designer at Adobe

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Do you remember a time when digital design looked like this?

We called it skeuomorphism. And it was the shit. Most digital interfaces relied on visual metaphors from the real world to communicate function and help users navigate this new digital space. Since then, everything’s changed. Many startups have now emerged as top global companies, all the while revolutionized traditional industries like travel, news publishing and retail.

"The world’s largest taxi firm, Uber, owns no cars. The world’s most popular media company, Facebook, creates no content. The world’s most valuable retailer, Alibaba, carries no stock. And the world’s largest accommodation provider, Airbnb, owns no property."

Tom Goodwin, Havas

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