Five to inspire with Molly Lafferty
Design Director @ This Also
Who are you?
I’m a product and UI motion designer based in Brooklyn, NY. Currenty, I’m a Design Director at This Also, a product and brand design studio, where I work with both startups and large tech companies, including Google and Microsoft.
I was born and raised in Ohio, and after studying film in college, I decided to go to graduate school for design. There I focused on designing for healthcare and developing tools for patients managing chronic illness. After school, I moved to New York City to begin my career as a designer at the digital agency Huge.
What’s a typical day on Molly life like?
One of the benefits of working in a small studio is that my day isn’t loaded with meetings, so I’m able to spend most of it heads down in work. Our workflow and process varies from client to client, but generally we work in short, quick sprints and share our work often. I’m usually either designing in Sketch, working on some motion sketches in After Effects, or meeting with clients. I also set aside time each week to work on internal projects or outreach.
In my spare time, I’m a weaver. Like many digital designers, I needed a creative outlet outside of a computer screen and found weaving to be a good mix of math and creativity. Looms were the first computers, after all!
How would you define good design?
It’s easy to get caught up in one aspect of a product, whether that’s delivering a unique interface, leveraging a technology in a smart way or meeting key business objectives. Ultimately good design less about the design itself and more about the success of the product for users and within the marketplace. If you’re able to shift between the details and the big picture as you design, you’re more likely to deliver a successful product.
Share something you’d really like to do — but haven’t done yet. What’s keeping you from doing it?
Returning to designing for healthcare. I deliberately chose to join the agency world after graduate school because I believed there was a lot to learn from designing mass market, consumer-facing products that could be applied to the world of healthcare and enterprise products. Now I’m ready to put that into action. It will happen, we’re just waiting for the right opportunity.
I’m also interested in finding ways to support young creatives who may not have the same access to the tools, technology, and education as others. How can we, as a small studio, engage with students outside the big name art and design schools? We have some ideas we’re hoping to develop, but as always it comes down to a balance of time. Hopefully this year is the year!
How do you imagine your life as a designer 10 years from now will be?
I have no idea, which is part of what drew me to this field in the first place. All I knew when I started developing websites during college was that the internet was here to stay, and I enjoyed tackling it from a user’s perspective. Professionally, I hope to be mentoring designers, and leading and developing design teams. But the actual design challenges, technology, and even tools we’ll be using will likely be radically different.
People and/or designers that inspire you? (personally and professionally)
Erica Baker, whose writing helped me recognize my own privilege in our industry and the issues of diversity and inclusion at large
Julie Zhou, for some of the best writing out there on product design and design careers
Es Devlin, for her creativity, tenacity, and prolific career as a stage designer
Where can we find Molly Lafferty?
Personal Site: http://mklafferty.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/mollylafferty
Medium: https://medium.com/@mollylafferty
Studio: http://thisalso.com/
