In-House Designers: Speak Up!

Aug 27, 2013

I don’t work in a loft in Williamsburg or the Mission. I can’t drink my favorite IPA while I code.

I sit in a cubicle in a corporate park halfway between D.C. and Baltimore. Am I jealous of those in Brooklyn and San Francisco? No, I love my job. However, I must say that I have been hesitant to speak out about my experience as a web designer for a network security company.

Why you ask? I guess because the majority of what I read is written by designers and developers working for agencies and startups who build apps and sites for high profile clients. Who would want to hear about working on “less glamorous” projects? I realize now, there are many more people like me working in a similar role. What we read is the experience of the minority of the industry.

It’s time to speak up and I want others to do the same. I want to hear about the challenges, triumphs, and lessons learned from working at a bigger company with internal clients.

The kinds of stories I want to hear:

  • Working with an existing brand and refining it
  • How to sell your in-house team to internal clients
  • What has your team accomplished?
  • Who have you collaborated with internally or externally to complete a project?

We Always Need More Points of View

The web industry has an amazing community made up of designers and developers who are vocal and help each other out. While I love reading A List Apart, Smashing Magazine, and Medium, I wish there were more people speaking out about what it’s like working internally for a larger, corporate organization. I crave to read more articles that I can relate to. There needs to be more books like The Corporate Creative and more magazines like HOW. We can always benefit from different points of view.

Blogs from the Vox Media Product team, Target Creative, and NPR have showed some insight into what it’s like being the creative team amongst a larger organization not focused on design, but I want more!

I’ll share some stories of my own in an upcoming post, but for now, I want the corporate creatives out there to know that their story is worth being told and that many people look forward to reading them!

Originally posted on Medium