A conversation with Color Design Fellow Blanca Diaz
This is the second of a three-part series on the Color Design Fellowship. We’re currently looking for an aspiring product designer and content designer to join our next cohort of fellows.
In 2021, we launched the Color Design Fellowship, a 12-week rotational program aimed at providing candidates with the opportunity, tools, and mentorship to tackle a real-world problem through product design, content design, and research. There are lots of incredible internship programs in our industry for new grads, and we wanted to create space for folks from non-traditional backgrounds to kick-start their professional journey as designers.
We welcomed our first cohort of fellows in September, and their work and willingness to help us kick the tires on our new program far exceeded our expectations. I sat down over Zoom with Blanca Diaz in her final week to talk about her experience as one of our inaugural Color Design Fellows, her goals for the future, and to ask for any advice she might have for future cohorts.
Tell me about your background prior to becoming a designer and what led you to changing careers?
Prior to joining the fellowship, I was working in an HR role at a chocolate factory in San Francisco . I had no idea what I wanted to do professionally, but I knew that I wanted to work in a role that empowers people in some way. So I just applied to every role that had the word “people” in the title. Eventually, I got promoted into a position focusing on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) since that’s more of what I studied in college. And then, when the pandemic hit, we shifted from being in-person retail only to more of an online store. After that, my role really changed. The CEO asked me if I knew any coding, and because I made such a killer hangman game in college, I was asked to take on more of the front-end web development for the company’s website. And so that was how I discovered UX and found this exciting new career.
Did your experience working in those other roles help inform your work as a designer?
Yeah, definitely. The way that I found out about UX was actually by leading a design sprint. I didn’t know that’s what they were called, but was tasked with looking at a way to redesign the homepage, so I did research on how our users were using the site and a competitive analysis, though I didn’t know these terms yet. I brought it to our team and was like, hey, based on this information that I’ve learned, I think this is what we should be doing.
I looked up a lot of YouTube videos to figure out what the heck I was doing, what to do next, and how to get closer towards a solution. And that’s where I first heard the word UX or user experience and fell in love with it. I think I’ve always been asking very design-oriented questions my whole life without realizing it.
How did you hear about the Color Design Fellowship, and what prompted you to apply?
Once I started learning more about UX, basically all media that I consumed was UX related — podcasts, videos, and all that. I also joined a few design communities to learn more about it and learn more about the people that work in this field. I’m on Discord, and there was a Discord channel where someone that worked at Color posted the fellowship and mentioned that it was open to folks looking to transition into this field, which was exactly what I was looking for since I’m not a recent grad. But I’m also very new to this field and this fellowship just perfectly aligned with what I was looking for at the time.
Are there any design communities that you found useful that you’d recommend to others that are trying to break into design?
The biggest one that I’m a part of is Techquería, which is a network of Latine professionals in tech in general. Within that, there was a core cohort focused on just UX and UX research that’s been very supportive. There’s also Design Buddies, which has a great speaker series that they put on, and UXD Struggle Bus, which is for entry level folks or anyone doing a drastic career change.
What did you work on during your time at Color?
I worked on a lot! I worked with the vaccines team to make sure it’s easy and accessible for folks to choose a convenient place to receive their vaccines. I also worked on a hackathon project with barcode scanning, which I’m really excited about. My final project was to create more consistent and accessible table components to add to our design system at Color.
What was it like being part of the Color design team?
It was an empowering experience to be around such talented and experienced team members, who were very well grounded, very kind, and very supportive throughout this whole experience. I learned so much being surrounded by people who have more experience than I do. And overall, their willingness to support me and help me grow or improve on my designs really helped accelerate my skill set and hone in on a lot of technical and soft skills that would have probably taken me a whole year to develop on my own.
What did you learn or foster here that’s different from what you’ve done before?
I think working with a lot of different roles was really neat even within the design team, like content designers or user researchers. One of the biggest takeaways that I got from all of that was that collaborating on design with cross-functional partners can be very beneficial. I think I got some of the best design feedback from an engineer or the PM on a team. It really opened my eyes to how to better collaborate with folks outside of your own project, or who you’re normally working with.
What were you hoping to get out of this experience? And have you achieved that goal?
One of the biggest things that I wanted to work towards was just honing in on my UI skills, because I know that what I worked on before the fellowship, and what I saw live on actual sites looked very, very different, and I couldn’t necessarily identify why. So I feel like that’s tremendously improved in my time here. And I’m also more aware of how to align what I am designing with a bigger design system and to be consistent with branding within a company.
What advice would you have for others that are considering this fellowship?
I don’t know if this should be included, but don’t Google the project when you’re in the midst of applying because a lot of people post their projects online.
Oh, funny. What do you mean?
After I applied and submitted it, my partner looked it up and showed me a list of five different projects that people posted. So now I had all these people to compare myself to. And I was like, “I’m not good enough.” Aside from that, I think what people should know in applying for this fellowship is, number one, don’t be afraid to ask for help. Right away. I think that’s something that I did and why I improved so much in my work, just because I knew that I had to be very open and receptive to feedback. So that’s something that I’d encourage people to do in order to be successful in the fellowship, despite how intimidating it is to be around all these amazing people. At the end of the day, they are very kind, they’re very supportive, they’re all rooting for you, and they are going to help you become a better designer.
Blanca Diaz is a product designer from East Palo Alto, California. She recently joined Color as a Product Designer.
