By — Amit Das, SVP Design
How can Graphic Designers move beyond just creating banners and add meaningful value to an organisation.
Graphic design is how we create assets that communicate with the means of visual elements. Simple, right? However, I believe it’s one of the most challenging skills to hone, and it’s tough to find good great graphic designers.
Most graphic designers we know or speak with find themselves designing, well, banners. Banners that come as a line item request from mostly marketing teams. Banners in different shapes and forms constitute making them “pop” or making the button bigger. Designers find themselves in some version of the banner designing business for years before the FOMO of becoming product designer kicks in.
At Urban Company, we look at this differently, and I believe we can bring change. Let me illustrate this by giving real-life examples. Here are a few things that a designer (specialising in graphic design) does at UC:
1. Designing for customers
I wrote in detail about what content design means at Urban Company. A graphic designer here works directly off insights from user interviews. We understand that booking an at-home service is dramatically different from buying a product on Amazon, where there are anxieties, apprehensions and lack of clarity on the scope of work, way of service, expectations and such.
We learn which parts of content users don’t read and make necessary changes to make it more appealing, in-flow and easy to understand.
Ganesh Deherkar made a move from his banner designing days in his previous stint to solving real content problems for customers at Urban Company. Shiv Kapoor (Ex-Head of International Product at Urban Company) switched from his Product Management role to spearheading Content.
2. Designing for partners
UC professionals are skilled beauticians, technicians, electricians, painters, and cleaners. They belong to multiple nationalities across different countries where we operate. Designing an identity for them to resonate with and engage with is not a trivial task.
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We work with researchers to illustrate actual scripts that’d then become training videos for our partners. From simple icons to script visualisation, to video training thumbnails, to an interactive IG-style story — we’re designing assets and communicating complex concepts that impact our professionals directly.
3. Designing for scale
Graphic designers at Urban Company don’t just make stuff beautiful, simple, and valuable; they do it for scale.
We invest in creating playbooks, guidelines, and frameworks so we can get the routine work out of the way and focus energy on creating high-quality content design.
We work with deployment engineers to automate template-based assets, checklists/SOPs for unblocking frequently asked-for assets. This saves us tons of money, human time, and energy by automating
4. Going beyond digital
Off late, we’ve also forayed into physical product design. We sell our own water purifiers, and there’s an all-new water purifier on its way. Our design team worked very closely with an external industrial design agency to make this happen — all the way from corner radius to finish of materials.
And this is just the beginning.
Most designers dream of working at Apple, understandably so with their iconic, industry-defining hardware and software design. Jony Ive, the icon who made this cult happen, joined Apple in 1992 — sixteen years after Jobs founded Apple!
We’re at year 8 of Urban Company. Imagine the pride you’d feel looking back 5 years from now, having your work define home services design. The pride you’d feel designing home appliances. The pride you’d own designing the entire ecosystem. That pride is our pitch.
If you’re a kick-ass Graphic or Motion Designer, we’re looking for you to join us on this long journey. Apply here.
I’m interested in almost anything and everything. My childhood has influenced heavily on how I observe, or even get excited about things around me. My parents got me to learn Hawaiian guitar when I was 8 years old. I used to create a lot of scrapbooks with good photographs cutting from old newspapers and magazines.
