Design Stories: How Creative Melissa Lissone’s past has shaped her present
Adyen, for all intents and purposes, is a fintech company. But in industry-label only.
The company is more than just a payment solution. There’s a certain culture behind Adyen — one without hierarchy, without ego. But with plenty of style and panache. This really is a band of rebels, or self-proclaimed misfits.
From designers to developers to marketing geniuses. This is the real competitive advantage for the company known for dominating an industry.
One incredible team member is Creative, Melissa Lissone.
Melissa’s tale is the first of many stories we’ll share in our Design Stories — a new way to hear from Adyen about their experience, early successes, and tips for creating great designs.
How it all began
Melissa always loved to create things and started studying at a school where she was introduced with different ways to be creative — including photography, 3D furniture design, creating videos, graphic design and even setting up window shops.
Though she really wanted to get her bachelor’s, Melissa felt an ‘art academy’ would be too artsy as she tended to lean more towards the commercial side of design — focusing more on problem solving and work with briefings.
“For me it’s important to make sense of the design I’m creating and have a good concept behind it.”
So she ditched the traditional route of art school and instead studied at the prestigious University of Lincoln, where the focus was more on concept development. This piqued an interest in the theory where Melissa went on to study applied creativity at Amsterdam’s Hallo Academy.
Keeping it in the family
Growing up with two older brothers, Melissa was interested in technology from a young age. As she explains,
“My brothers would explain how technology worked — from DVD players to computers. But they always said each lesson would happen only once. So I needed to pay close attention, and that’s what I did.”
At the ripe age of 11, Melissa was installing CD drives for friends. But it wasn’t just her sibling’s fascination that influenced her love affair with technology.
A photographer from Indonesia — a part of the world synonymous with being head of the latest tech trends — Melissa’s grandfather was usually one of the first to implement color into photographs in the Netherlands. Melissa remembers visiting her grandfather and every week he’d pull out a new lens or filter or any myriad of photography-related tech. They would ooh and ahh and play around with the latest innovation together.
Her father was also influential in her life — always bringing home old computers from work. In fact, there wasn’t a time in her life that she can’t remember tinkering around with gadgets. To this day, her father still proudly shows off his latest geeky find from eBay.
Ironically enough, her father was an IT specialist at a bank. So when Melissa had the chance to work for in fintech, it was the perfect continuation to her upbringing and interests, and she felt at home in the industry.
From freelancing to full-time
Upon the arrival of her first born (Melissa is actually expecting number two in September), she realized that with freelancing, there wasn’t much of a routine, often making it difficult to find a rhythm for her son.
Having noticed that more and more companies and brands were establishing their own creative departments in-house made her wonder how it would be on the “other” side.
But just how much greener the grass is on the other side of the “freelance” fence?
Melissa, with plenty already on her table as full-time mom and full-time art director, also found herself cofounder of a new business venture. This is where the pros of structure overcame the cons of routine.
But this wasn’t an ordinary job. Adyen, known for its casual business acumen and treating their clients like partners, also treat employees like family. And could provide the structure Melissa needed with the freedom she craved as an imaginative individual.
“Routine, which could mean a lot of repetition, isn’t the case at Adyen as you get a lot of freedom in what you do and do the things you’d like to do that day. Which is not too different to freelancing. Oh and did I mention their nice lunch?”
The transition from freelance to fulltime wasn’t so Melissa could settle down — quite the contrary. The payment platform offered a new challenge and more motivation and opportunity to be innovative. As well as an outlet where her fresh and artistic perspective could be utilized.
Adyen includes a great international team of energetic people encompassing the very definition of what it means to be entrepreneurial — where employees are encouraged to travel (the company has an exchange program where staff can work 8 to twelve weeks in one of Adyen’s worldwide locations), coworkers challenge each other to be better every day, and the unofficial internal motto is: If you want to do something, you just do it.
“You’re really free to create and do what you want. They don’t lock you into anything — there are no boxes.”
It’s this project independence and diversity that keeps Adyen and its employees constantly innovating.
Bringing sexy back… to modern money
There are a lot of words that come to mind when you think finance, but thrilling isn’t one of them. When you’re subjected to more regulations than other industries, you’re not the type of brand that bring much pleasure to consumers — or employees.
That’s why Adyen isn’t your normal fintech company.
Always transforming the finance sector, employees get pretty excited as new collaborations come together and teams find a way to turn stuffy and boring into fun and inspiring.
Take MarketPay, one of Adyen’s main products, for instance. Though released in 2015, the payment solution still needed a visual identity and a landing page.
That’s where Melissa and her creative cohorts come in. The project began in one of her first weeks at the company. As such, Melissa needed to first understand the existing visual language of Adyen.
“As the product itself is quite complicated and abstract, we wanted to visualize it in a clean and minimalistic way.”
Afterall, filling the screen with distracting, in-your-face graphics and transitions does a huge disservice to the customer experience — a core concept of the brand’s customer-centric philosophy.
Though Melissa ran the lead on this project, she knew she could trust her colleagues to have her back and help if needed.
After a few trials and errors, in roughly three months time — from sketch to prototype to designing the perfect concept — MarketPay’s identity was established, and the website was launched.
While us mere mortals have to wait a bit for the final result, you can still enjoy watching the design gods in action in this behind the scenes video.
Up next, the team will use their bravado and creativity to integrate video and animated GIFS into the final site, as well as make the entirety campaignable.
Tips to share
We asked Melissa to share some helpful tips from her experience in design and creativity. Here are just a few:
Persistence pays off over talent. You can be good in what you do but that isn’t enough. I think it is much more important not to give up, keep on believing in your ideas and working hard for it.
The best design is the one you don’t really notice. Everything around us is designed, the spoon you use daily, the buttons in the elevator, or even the bell on your bike. Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.
Always try to think in opportunities instead of focussing on what isn’t possible. You will notice you will gain much more ideas. Therefore using the word ‘but’ is a no-go in the creative process.
