Charles Chen: Our Marketing Designer
I sat down with Charles to learn about his career journey and philosophy as a designer.
Can talk about your journey into the world of graphic design and how you transitioned into specializing in marketing design?
Charles: I would characterize my design education as relatively generalized, with a focus in video production and UX design. Having said that, I think most graphic design educations imbue you with the basics of what is needed to produce marketing deliverables in a timely and effective manner. I was hired out of college as a UX designer and bounced around a few UX jobs until I transitioned into marketing at a company as a result of my boss making a lateral move to the marketing department. There, I honed my camera, video production, and marketing deliverable design skills, until I was hired at RocketReach, first as a UX designer. Then I transitioned over to marketing about nine months ago now, and the rest is history!
What inspired you to pursue a career in marketing graphic design?
As you may have gathered, I don’t know that I really have done that. Not to disparage marketing design, as it’s brought me a lot of creative joy and fulfillment, but I’ve only ever been hired as a UX designer and transitioned over to marketing as a company has grown.
Instead, I think it’s more substantive if I answer this question from the frame of design generalism. I think I’ve made a reasonably successful bid at being a design generalist. This is to say that I am happily a jack of all trades, master of none when it comes to design. I think I thrive the most when given a wide variety of projects to work on, and my design education really fomented that type of growth. As a result, I think that made me the designer I am today, and I’m very happy to be constantly working on different projects and stimulating different parts of my brain as a marketing designer.
In your opinion, what sets marketing graphic design apart from other forms of graphic design?
Having only worked professionally as a UX designer and as a marketing designer, I would say that marketing design is much more unpredictable. Generally speaking, in UX, you have a pretty stable set of projects with a set of stakeholders, and you work to a predictable timeline (usually a certain number of sprints ahead of engineering).
Marketing timelines are much more flexible. Because the end deliverables can be posted as-is (and don’t have to be built by a whole team of developers working in harmony), the timelines for marketing can be much more loose and unpredictable. This also lends an unpredictability to the type of work that is being undertaken. While certain things like product launches and quarterly announcements have predictable timelines, other things are much more spur-of-the-moment. A great example of this was piggybacking upon the popularity of Spotify Wrapped at the end of 2023, and very quickly coming up with a set of social media posts that differ significantly from our usual visual style. I find that kind of chaos fun, which is why I think I thrive in this type of environment.
How do you approach the process of creating designs that effectively convey marketing messages?
I believe many of the things that make good UX design successful make good marketing design successful as well. Understanding your audience, making the message clear and usable, and having a view of what your competitors are offering and what differentiators you can then have are good rules of thumb to follow.
Of course, it has to look good and it has to convey the message clearly, but that becomes relatively easy with experience. There’s also the idea of ad blindness — that is to say, if you pelt the viewer with too many ads of a consistent visual style, they begin to tune it out completely. Sometimes it’s worth designing things that are off the beaten path or visually jarring enough to get them to tune back in.
What role do you believe graphic design plays in shaping a brand’s identity and overall marketing strategy?
Here I have to refer back to Marshall McLuhan’s seminal phrase “The medium is the message.” The way you convey what you offer is just as integral to the end result as the message you’re conveying through said medium.
In other words, your customers read your brand and marketing strategy through the lens of the conveyance. They get just as much information about your product, consciously or subconsciously, through reading your marketing messages as they do through viewing your logo, brand colors, website margins, spelling errors, and whether or not you use Oxford commas. I’m not stressing equal importance on each of those factors, but a good example I could cite would be that you see a lot more spelling errors on startup websites than on those of enterprise-level SaaS products.
Can you share some examples of successful marketing campaigns you’ve been a part of, and how your designs contributed to their success?
Outside of RocketReach, I contributed to a marketing event for an ad agency that won an American Graphic Design Award. We gave out these little jars of Red Hots candy with a card that said “RED HOT IDEAS”. The O was a hole that was painstakingly hand-burnt into every card. That was a really fun project.
At RocketReach, I think some of our more successful organic marketing pushes come from our more spur-of-the-moment ideas. Our take on Spotify Wrapped did really well, as do our instagram-style swipe ‘eBooks’. I think these involve some combination of quick thinking, great design basics, and an understanding of what users really engage with in order to be successful.
How do you stay updated on the latest design trends and marketing techniques to ensure your work remains fresh and relevant?
I stay subscribed to a number of publications (my favorite of which has always been Brand New). I also keep up to date with marketing (social media posts, splash page changes, etc.) for a number of SaaS products, both in and out of our direct competition. It’s important to stay up to date with trends to ensure your work isn’t falling behind.
How do you collaborate with other members of a marketing team, such as copywriters or digital marketers, to ensure cohesive messaging across different channels?
I’m really fortunate to work with such a great team of marketers. I would say at this point in the game it’s relatively easy to ensure cohesion across all of our different channels. This is because we’re a relatively small team (I am one designer on a team of four marketers) and I still have one foot in product, thanks to my frequent communication with our design team. With the guidance of the marketing and design teams, I’m slowly pushing the evolution of our brand into something more mature and that targets a more enterprise-level user.
What advice would you give to aspiring marketing graphic designers looking to break into the industry?
Adaptation is your friend. As a marketing designer, you will be asked to do a lot of different things, and your ability to learn on the job and push the envelope on new ideas, prompts, and skillsets will set you apart from the designers that can’t do that. Some days you’re editing a video on a product, and some other days you’re outside burning holes into cards for a marketing campaign. A good marketing designer finds joy in both, and in the uncertainty in between.
