Collaborating with other senior level designers to make sense of a high-growth startup for a team of designers.
Role: Art Director / Senior Art Director
Accessibility, Design Mentoring, Community Management, Design Operations
2019–2022
Accessibility, Design Mentoring, Community Management, Design Operations
2019–2022
Callisto Media is a data-driven publisher upending the traditional printed-media publishing model by functioning more like a digital product company. Creating books for their public-facing brand Rockridge Press by rapidly iterating on content and niche research to address user needs Callisto fills gaps in the market place and grew revenue by as much as 61% year over year. As the design team grew from numbering in the teens to upwards of 60 (including designers, art directors, production designers, and art producers), I saw gaps that I addressed to improve our products and our operations.
What it looks like is not enough
There was an interesting cross section of designers at Callisto during my time there—some coming from product and other coming form traditional print publishing. With my background in education and development (as well as traditional publishing), I was able to bridge the various points of view and immediately go to work in mentoring designers to either educate them on publishing design tools and design OR disabuse publishing designers of inefficient methods to achieve collaboration and productivity goals.
Despite the company's talk about a data-driven publishing model, not much in the design department was driven by anything other that making it "look good". I set about working with the production design team to ensure greater usability standards were implemented in the team's work with contrast checkers and improved font choices to better align with ADA and WCAG guidelines.
Next, I looked at implementing A/B testing in our cover design process to test success rates of the work under management rather than going with our guts, or the instincts of upper management. After some months of research and recommendations on my part, I was told that this project was deemed too expensive. I continued discussing this issue with those in more senior positions, and after a few more months success came in the form of a program to do iterative design for covers of books after they'd already launched—refreshing the covers or titles to better align with user expectations. The program would make use of amazon reviews to understand our actual buyers, and we selected books to refresh after a test period if the sales were not up to projections.
(Amazon+ page designs for a title I art directed)
Mentoring and design systems
From 2007–2011 I was a teacher. I ran design workshops mainly for adults in a continuing education environment to learn anything I knew from design, animation, and video software to HTML/CSS/JavaScript or PHP/WordPress. This culminated in me being an adjunct professor at Cornish College of the Arts, my alma mater, where I ran 3 sections of the art+design foundations program. Based on this experience I was often called upon in an onboarding / mentoring capacity with younger designers at Callisto Media. I would help them get up to speed on processes and coach them in actual design practices. I also worked with another art director in building out a weekly inspiration email where we could offer an introduction to historically significant designers and recent discoveries alike. This was offered as inspiration and education and help unify the team in our understanding of design.
With the designers I personally mentored, I offered tips and tricks in using Adobe InDesign for the composition of long-form books including GREP styles to ensure clean typography and use of paragraph styles. This led to a development of a template system and design system based on Adobe Libraries. I collaborated with a number of designers on styles for objects, tables, and text to disseminate to the wider team and improve efficiency. After the successful implementation of the components above I worked with my team to design 6 book interior templates for various content types, i.e., books on psychology, relationships, self-help, journals, etc. When we had our 6 designs we handed them off to our production designers to ensure consistency between the approaches in the files and then added them to the resource library. When put into practice these increased the productivity of a given interior designer by 10x.
Building community and improving systems
As the company grew the org chart changed numerous times and roles came and went. One role we started with and then lost was a design operations manager. In conjunction with that departure was a change in team communications and team-wide meeting cadence. I heard my juniors and others that I did not directly manage that they missed the connection with the rest of the team, especially as we were all newly remote due to the pandemic.
In response I reinstated a bi-monthly workshopping session where designers could meet outside of a direct report chain of command to discuss their work and the job. I would encourage everybody (and led by example) in discussing work-in-process, to present and get feedback. To make these helpful as work shares they needed to be less than 10 participants and with the team as large as it was this meant there was still a feeling of separation among the more junior folks, so I established a bi-weekly team-wide (optional) meeting where we could meet to discuss company/team news, process updates—from the seniors down. I then used these as occasions to solicit solutions to problems that anybody might mention so we could capture any kvetching and turn it into a solutions-oriented focus group.
Eventually this led to me organizing groups that I assigned to explore topics ranging from how we shared files collaboratively (within IT parameters), and improvements to the design system.
Takeaways
When I came into this role I had managed full-time and freelance contract workers and interns, but working with not only my small team of direct reports but also the wider team in a community-building capacity I discovered that working FOR the team was deeply rewarding. I learned a lot about what kinds of organizational structures can work to help a team feel empowered, or take away agency and connection.
Applying product design methods of user research, affinity mapping, persona building, et cetera to printed publications was not always easy—mainly because of pushback from designers who were unfamiliar with the ideas—or worse—felt it was unnecessary. It was a great challenge though and obviously resulted in a better product, and I believe led to a greater number of bestselling titles than we otherwise would have achieved had we not kept the user front-and-center.
