In-house team Est. 2021 (previously the Culture Design team)
Employee Experience Design
We exist to make Shopify employees feel valued, appreciated, and connected to the company’s mission and values — in particular now that we’re remote. Our small but mighty team focuses on Shopify’s employee experience design needs, supporting the larger Employee Experience team by designing products, branding, and graphics that infuse surprise, delight, and joy into the day-to-day of Shopifolk – from onboarding and work anniversaries, to offsites, home office setups/decor, events, and team celebrations. We aim to recognize Shopify’s merchants just as much as our employees, and try to highlight and partner with them as much as possible in our work.
FOLLOW THE TEAM AT
dribbble.com/Shopify
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Team Members (2)
(AS OF PUB. DATE: Jul/11/2022)
On working in-house…
Benefits
Our favourite part about being an in-house team is the level of creative freedom and autonomy we’re afforded in our work. We’re able to create our own briefs, spearhead projects in areas where we feel we can have impact, and are able to act as our own art directors. We work in a very high-trust environment and with that comes a unique amount of control – we are seen as the experts in our craft and often act as final decision-makers in addition to being the designers on the project. We also absolutely love that our jobs are to design for our coworkers because this means we get to see the impact of our work in real time. We’re able to see people get excited by the designs we create and see how they bring joy to fellow Shopifolk.
Challenges
One challenge we face is that our team is very small. We have a ton of ideas, but ultimately we’re only two people, which means we don’t get to execute on all of them. Additionally, Shopify is a global company with a workforce that spans many cultures, time zones, countries, and climates. It is a unique kind of challenge to create design that is universally appealing and impactful without being boring or generic. We also work hard to educate other teams on our role as a creative partner rather than a creative service. This is essential in ensuring that we’re brought into projects early so that we can participate in key decision-making and advise on creative strategy. If we’re pulled in too late in the process, it may be past the point where we can live up to our full potential for impact.
On working with…
Others
Our team will occasionally work with freelancers or outside agencies. We’ll bring them in on very large projects to help provide a fresh perspective and support us on highly specialized projects (ex. animation, development, video) that our team doesn’t have capacity or skillset to take on ourselves. We will also sometimes outsource small one-off projects to freelancers who can tackle them as easily as an in-house team member would, so that the in-house member’s time can be freed up for more impactful work that requires a high level of context and stakeholder engagement.More frequently, our team will pull in creatives from other internal teams to help us with specific projects.
Guidelines
Shopify has company brand foundations that are built to be flexible but provide a basic set of guidelines around colour, typography, tone of voice, photography, etc. These guidelines were created for external projects, and while we often use them as a foundation, we aren’t tied to them for internal work. Since our work is very context-specific and intended for a Shopify audience, we are often able to take creative license while using our best judgment. Because we aren’t bound to the brand guidelines, we’re able to build on them to create a lot of variety and expressive visual texture in the work that we make, while still grounding it something that feels innately “Shopify.” This is both a challenge and an opportunity: sometimes there are just too many visual options and keeping the project feeling grounded in “Shopify” can become a subjective and abstract goal, while other times it allows us a lot of creative freedom and opportunity to grow and develop Shopify’s internal brand with every project we work on.
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