From the Swoosh to Big Blue
How does a designer go from Nike to IBM?
The short answer is that there’s no real defined path when you’re making transitions from marketing to software. That’s true for a lot of job transition — it’s true for designers and it’s true for most people in general.
For me, the shift from working at Nike to IBM was not a normal path. But then again I never thought I would had worked at Nike in the first place. And I never really thought I would be working at IBM either. However sometimes the star’s align and things just happen. But how do you make a transition like this? It wasn’t until a few weeks into IBM Design DesignCamp that I was talking to a friend who really pushed the subject asking me how do you go from designing for athletic sports driven marketing collateral to designing software for a company like IBM?
“How do you go from designing for athletic sports driven marketing collateral to designing software for a company like IBM?”
This was not something I really thought about before. It was just a challenge to design something new, push myself to a new level as a designer and get away from Pantone 382C. Eventually I really started to think about it and tried to figure out how & why did I go from Nike to IBM.
And really the answer to the question is quite simple, when I was at Nike, I was designing everything from the main SPARQ website, to entire conferences experiences (including the builds, programs, giveaways etc.) and anything else under the sun they would task me with. I was never designing just print, or just web, I was designing experiences.
IBM is a whole other kind of beast, it’s not a small team like I was at Nike, it’s a company of 400,000+ employees. And a few hundred designers just in IBM Design. But when I started, I was tossed into DesignCamp to figure out the way they want to do things, what their design language was and what was the problem at hand. But again once I started to realize what was going on and started to grasp the concepts it was similar to what I was doing at Nike, just new tools, new ways of doing things and I was no longer designing for printed pieces but I was still designing for experiences.
So now if someone ask me how does a designer go from Nike to IBM or really any company to any company it’s about designing for the experience. And the core of any experience is the user, so really your sole job as a designer regardless of the company or task your designing for the overall user experience. Once you can wrap your head around that concept, you can really design for anything.
The user is king.
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If your curious on more of what is going on at IBM Design check out fellow new hire and friend Brian Han’s blog at IBM Design or about his first week at IBM Design + since DesignCamp is over, you can see his final reflection on his experience. Or you can also read from one of our section leaders Ashley Hathaway’s post about IBM Design Camp. Part 1.
