Marketing Design Dispatch
Join 17,000+ creatives receiving insider insights about brand and marketing design – featuring landing page and rebrand breakdowns, useful career content, and a behind-the-scenes look at running a Brand Studio team in tech.
What I learned from my performance review this week
Hi Reader, I just got back from my trip to Northern Spain - a few days in Gijón, which is a city on the Atlantic coast, and then half the week in Oviedo, the capital of Asturias. It was a great trip enjoying the cooler weather, visiting some beautiful beaches and doing a lot of reading during the 5 hour train journey, at the beach and in the hotel bar with cocktails (I finished 3 novels!) Now I'm back to work and back to a mountain of Slack messages. Hot tip: If you go away on PTO for more...
What happened when job titles stopped mattering
Hi Reader, Last week I shared an update from the middle of our Create Week hackathon. I'm happy to report that we managed to complete a functioning demo account! Here's our triumphant team in a freeze frame from our presentation video. Now that presentations are done and I'm back to regular work, I keep thinking about one thing I observed last week: We got so much done during Create Week because people were leaning into their skills rather than their role as defined by their job title. Let me...
A quick note from the middle of our company hackathon
Hi Reader, I’m writing this from the countryside near Barcelona, where the Kit team is halfway through Create Week - our second company hackathon. I’m leading a project I’ve been wanting to build for about 5 years: a proper demo account for Kit that’s filled with real-feeling content and data. You know how when you’re trying to show someone how a product works, but the account is full of empty states or placeholder text like this? very sad and empty Not ideal. So our sales team is often stuck...
Addressing the gap between knowing and doing
Can I be honest about something, Reader? I've been feeling like a bit of fraud lately. The thing is: Kit's brand design system is far from perfect. It's got outdated components, auto layout issues, and I know there's tons of useful design patterns or templates that we haven't yet added to our system to make them easy to reuse. We've been so busy with project work that we just haven't made it happen. And yet here I am, writing a book about how people can improve their marketing design...
Felt like sharing a bit of a 🌶️ hot take 🌶️ this week
Hey Reader, Ngl, I'm questioning if it's a good idea to send this email. But I've committed to sharing something I'm learning or thinking about in my role as Creative Director each week, and what's been on my mind this week is accountability and ownership – or rather, a lack of it. Sometimes when a designer is asked about how their work performed, they'll give a response like: "I wasn't given the results." or "Nobody shared the metrics with me, so I don't know how it performed." This pattern...
What I told our recruiter about hiring for our brand team
Hey Reader, Hiring is underway for the motion designer role I talked about in the last issue and wow – we've had more than 700 applications so far. I've been reviewing a lot of portfolios and show reels, which has been both exciting and overwhelming. Last week I hopped on a call with our recruiter, Emily, for an intake meeting to get aligned on what we're looking for in this role. She asked me a really good question: "What are some of the qualities of a successful Brand Studio team member?...
Something I learned about communicating with conviction
Have you ever had a team member reach out to you after a team meeting to compliment you on the way you answered a question? Well, Reader, that happened to me last week! We were in an all-team meeting discussing some changes we're making to the team, including new roles we're hiring for. One team member asked why we were hiring a motion designer full-time onto the Brand Studio team rather than using a contractor. I answered the question, and after the meeting something interesting happened—I...
What if AI could handle all the annoying parts of being an in-house creative team?
How much have you been thinking about AI lately, Reader? I've been thinking a lot about where AI can be most useful in my day-to-day work as Creative Director. I know a lot of people are using it to generate imagery or copy, but I'm much more interested in having AI take over the tedious, friction-filled parts of the job that pulls us away from actual creative thinking. The biggest one? Managing brand requests from around the company. How it works today (and why it's exhausting) Right now,...
What came first: the brand or the deep conversations?
I have a little story to tell you, Reader. Last week I was at Craft + Commerce, Kit's annual conference for creators in Boise, Idaho. With Anne-Laure Le Cunff & her fantastic book, Tiny Experiments With author & coach John Meese at the neon-themed closing party I met so many of our customers there and they're such wonderful people. But what really struck me about our conversations was how we kept skipping right past the surface level after introductions and immediately diving deep –...
Back to my roots (but make it Creative Director)
Hey Reader, Remember how in my last email I mentioned wanting to do things differently this year? Well, I've just uploaded my first YouTube video of 2025, and it marks the start of something new (well, actually old – but we'll get to that). While I was taking that three week break in New Zealand over the holidays, I started to get my spark back for creating content ✨ And it came from realising that there was a gap in the content I personally wanted to see: There's just not a lot of folks in...
Join 17,000+ creatives receiving insider insights about brand and marketing design – featuring landing page and rebrand breakdowns, useful career content, and a behind-the-scenes look at running a Brand Studio team in tech.