Crazy 2.0: Joining InVision as their new Head of Design Transformation

Design is in my DNA. A lot of people say things like that but as the son of a Creative Director and a soft sculpture fabric artist, who had his design education start when I was just two years old in the basement of my childhood home, its true. My father and I would write my storybooks and then create all the handset type and linoleum blocks we needed to bring the story to life on an antique letterpress. That education continued when I was 12 years old when I started to follow in my father’s footsteps on the path to becoming a Creative Director by working as a designer in his advertising agency cutting Rubylith and doing paste-up key art before there were even computers. I know things like that date me horribly, but it was a magical childhood that gave me a massive head start on my career.

Then it was off to college, and afterward, I was carving out a nice career in advertising when one client changed my life — American Airlines on September 11th. I had been helping to lead their advertising when that day happened, and over the following years, the team and I worked with them to find a new way forward for the company, a new voice for their brand and new ways to help them find the revenue to stay out of bankruptcy. That work helped me realize that for me building a brand was a much more interesting challenge than building an advertisement for a brand.

I loved that work, but I decided it was time for a change and the past 12+ years I’ve built and led in-house design teams for Starwood Hotels and Citi. Those teams and the resulting body of work let me rewrite my bucket list more times than I can count. I’ve been able to work with Apple on multiple projects including creating one of the featured apps for the launch of Apple Watch, and they have featured my work in 10 keynotes, 4 TV commercials, the Human Interface Guidelines on top of other honors like having one of my designs chosen as one of the world’s 100 best apps.

I loved being able to build the empowered design teams who were creating this world-class work and who were changing the course of the companies we worked for. During this time I also started to speak at more design conferences to share what I had learned, but I became very aware that our success as an in-house team seemed to be the exception and not the rule. I couldn’t understand why since I felt like creatives have the opportunity to affect business like we hadn’t seen since the Industrial Revolution. I started to share and teach more about how to empower design teams, become better leaders, be more creative and be more effective through my The Crazy One podcast and speaking engagements.

I could see it was having a positive effect, but there was still a massive opportunity to help to weave together all of the methodologies, processes, information, and tools that are available to design teams into a comprehensive strategy that would elevate the business impact of design within every company. I am very excited to share that I am joining InVision as the Head of Design Transformation to take on that problem.

Why InVision?

Creating a strategy to elevate the business impact of design within every company is an incredible opportunity and a massive challenge, but I can’t think of a company better positioned to take it on than InVision. At first, given the innovative work I was doing, I was drawn to their focus on bringing design-driven innovation to every company. My admiration grew as over the years as I saw that they were doing two critical things.

The first is their investment and commitment to the design community through things like the Design Leadership Forum, Design Disruptors and IBM Loop documentaries, their investment in Design Education, and more. The second is their roadmap and investments that have been more in tune with the needs of the design community than anything I have seen from other companies. You can see it in everything from their recent acquisition of Wake to help tackle the issue of design visibility, to the launch of Design Systems Manager to support complex needs in building and sustaining digital design systems, to the creation of InVison Studio to give designers a new design tool that they will give away for free, and much more. This combination of their commitment to the design community and innovative tools empower design teams to have a greater impact and do better work. These things made me and so many others a huge fan and supporter of the brand.

When it came time to think about making a change in my career, their CEO ‘Clark from InVision’ (who is real) was one of the first people I reached out to for advice but the ensuing conversations as nothing like what I expected. He started by simply saying “Tell me what it is you love to do, and let’s figure out how we can help you do it a more often.” As we talked it quickly became clear that we both saw the same challenges and opportunities in trying help elevate the business impact of design within every company. What I didn’t expect was the end of the conversation when he asked me if it was a challenge I would like to lead for InVision and if I would write up a job description for this new team and position. That one talk led to a lot more and now this new chapter in my career.

Empowering designers and creatives

I have spent most of my entire career as a Creative Director so some people have been surprised by this new direction in my career. I see it as a natural extension of the work I have been doing over the past 12+ years trying to empower design teams and elevate the role of design in some of the world’s best companies.

My team and I will start out working with InVision’s Enterprise clients who are over 80% of Fortune 100 companies and over 3,000 Enterprise customers globally which not only gives us the unique opportunity to see how the best operate, but also gives us access to work with nearly all of the world’s leading companies and emerging startups. We will consult and help teach those teams about things like design transformation and cultural change, design leadership, design best practices, and even more tactical things like how to build and implement a digital design system. Even though we are just starting out, I am lucky to already have a team of incredibly talented design leaders and experts from companies like NASDAQ, LinkedIn, Lego and others.

I am not going to go on this journey alone as I will be partnering with Aarron Walter, VP of Design Education. While we will both have our groups, we will both focus on design practices, and empowerment with Aarron focusing on how to bring that information to as many people as possible and I will focus on how to bring that information to teams in more of a one-on-one consulting style model. We will be using assessments models that will help designers and teams better understand the current state of their skills and that will then lead to helping them learn new practical skills, connecting them to other design leaders, and helping to draw attention to the incredible work of their teams. We will each have our own unique expressions of this core approach and feel this is going to be something very new and unique for our industry.

I could not be more excited to start this next chapter in my career with InVision. Design and the modern creative process are changing so quickly that we want to learn from you, work with you and share the work you’ve done and the things you’ve learned. If you are interested, please reach out to me ( stephengates@invisionapp.com ) as will all go further and faster together!