In this edition of "A Day in the Life at Catalyst" we meet Evonne Cheung, Senior Visual Designer.
What does your role involve?
I’m a Senior Visual Designer at Catalyst. My job is to create visually appealing and engaging designs that communicate messages, enhance user experience, and support branding. The value that a good design can add to an experience is often seen only when the design doesn’t exist, when you have to fight through information on a page to get to what you need, and when visual flow is illogical and things are screaming at you visually when they shouldn’t be. Designers take the frustration out of systems by organising the presentation of that information so that you see what we want you to see, using subtle visual cues to guide your eyes without you being aware of it. There’s always a purpose to what we design, right down to the white space on a page.
What does your typical day look like?
Variety is the spice of life, and as a designer I get to contribute to a lot of different projects within the company across various mediums. One minute I could be designing a logo for a brand, or creating marketing material for them in print and screen; next minute I could be working with BA/UX to create wireframes and designs for a website. My background is in animation and multimedia so I really enjoy when I get to stretch that muscle combining my creative illustration and composition skills with logical technical thinking. Most of my day is slogging away in front of a giant fancy pants monitor, where I can be heard but not seen (’cause of giant monitor), grunting and making weird animal noises while using graphic and layout software trying to action what I see in my head onto the screen.
Details of a specific task
I’m blessed in the sense that I’m a unicorn in the design world where I am a fully fledged designer who can also do front end development. Often designers can create wonderful designs but the form overpowers the function when they lack the understanding of how things will be built. It’s about knowing how I can push my designs to still be functional without losing creative flare. You don’t want designs just to be ‘colouring in’; it serves no purpose, and design should always be purposeful and aid the function of the thing you’ve designed for. Otherwise it’s art and caters to your own personal preferences.
I get to build some of the things that I design, specifically in Mahara, a project that I’ve worked on since the beginning. I created the brand from ground up, working with the team to fine tune the interface and create extension material for the community. It’s lovely to be able to follow a project through and be involved every step of the way, really building the brand personality up and have that time to see the design mature and change. Also Kristina Hoeppner, who leads the Mahara project, bless her, gives me a lot of creative freedom to really utilise all my creative skills in different ways: we’ve designed characters, merchandise, and even Lego mini-figures for the community!
Tell us about a recent problem you helped solve
Design can be very subjective; people can have a dislike towards something for no other reason than “because I don’t like it,” and that can create a problem where we’re chasing personal preferences.
The way I approach any project to avoid this happening is to first establish the design objective, or what I call the 3W’s:
- What (What are we doing, what is the deliverable at the end of this)
- Who (Who are we doing it for, establish the brand personality and describe the intended audience)
- and Why (Why are we doing this, is there an existing issue we’re trying to resolve).
Whenever I hit a blocker I will come back to these 3Ws to check that I am on course with my design. When you have something to measure the success of a project by, you avoid things falling into the personal preference category, and you can justify design choices by the objectives we need to meet. Clients need to be guided through this design journey. I’ve had a client come completely unprepared to a design briefing, and that’s okay because it’s hard to know what you want unless you understand what the issues are with your existing design. That’s when I have to guide them with specific direction reducing questions, or by showing them examples so they have something visual to talk to, to try and really define the creative area that I can work within. An open brief is the worst brief: you want boundaries, you want to know where the limits are. As designers we have to infer the information we get from our clients; a lot of it can be non-verbal and we learn to read between the lines.
What is it like working for Catalyst?
I’ve been working at Catalyst for coming up 17 years, that in itself should be a testimony to what working for the company is like. When I started, we could fit the whole company into a meeting room, and the percentage of people named ‘Andrew’ outnumbered the percentage of females in the company. Now, we have multiple branches across the globe and 300+ employees, so the company culture has definitely evolved, but the main thing that has stuck over the years is that Catalyst takes care of each other. It’s hard to find a company of this size that still displays passion for what they do, like Catalyst does. Even though Catalyst is predominantly a software development company, they appreciate the expertise visual designers can bring to their projects and understand that design is an essential part of any project, and the value we can bring to projects from the perspective of user engagement and brand establishment for the clients.
I remember not long after I started at Catalyst, one of the directors asked me how I thought they were doing. It wasn’t just about my performance; they see their performance as an employer as something they need to check up on. That’s very refreshing, to know that we are valued as people and that we’re working together towards a common goal. Our managing director, Don Christie, often uses this Māori proverb: He aha te mea nui? Māku e kii atu, he tāngata, he tāngata, he tāngata. (Translation: What is the most important thing in the world? Well, let me tell you, it is people, it is people, it is people.) I think that sums this company up quite well, it is all about the people. The people make the culture. It’s not something that can be generated through social events or company benefits, people naturally gravitate towards like-minded people, people who help each other be the best that they can be.