Five to inspire with Sebastian Speier
Design Director @ Nike
Who are you?
I am a Design Director and Graphic Designer living and working out of Brooklyn, NY. Born and raised in Vancouver, I would eventually move to Montreal to obtain a BFA Honors in Design from Concordia University. After a long stint in Toronto, I moved to New York to pursue a career at Huge, and then This Also–an agency that primarily focusses on digital products. I am now the Design Director on the SNKRS app at Nike. Professionally, I balance my professional work with a personal freelance graphic design and illustration practice. When I’m not designing, I can be found working on my bike, reading about art and fashion, taking photos, or planning the next hike.
What’s a typical day on Sebastian’s life like?
Right now I am a Design Director on the SNKRS app at Nike. As a Design Director, I manage a team of Products Designers, and sell our design vision for the app to leadership at Nike. A lot of meetings, and a lot of conversations. When I want to sit down and do actual design work, I’ll block off time in my calendar for “Design Time,” so that the time doesn’t get eaten up by extraneous meetings. Working in house has been a big change from working at a small design studio, and while I love having more responsibility, and love working with our talented designers, I do miss how hands-on I used to be. I still do a lot of the high level initial designs on some of our new features, and I’ll usually work in Sketch. At Nike, we prototype exclusively in Principle so I often work with Sketch and Principle in tandem. A lot of my day is also spent in Keynote, making decks and telling the stories around our vision and strategy for the product.
How would you define good design?
I measure success against the challenges and goals that we set out to accomplish from the beginning. As much as I love expressive and artistic graphic design, and love to do illustration, product design is often driven by data and we want create good user experiences. I have three metrics that I always try to design against on digital products:
• Increase market share / Get more people downloading the app
• Increase engagement / Keep users in the app with discoverable content
• Increase retention / Get users to open the app frequently, and keep them in it
But even as a graphic designer, you can chose to design for yourself, or for the problem. Design should be about solutions, not necessarily personal expression. So for me, I would say good design is any solution to a problem that someone wants to fix. If you can do that while expressing your own personal opinion or design language, then you have stumbled across something great.
Share something you’d really like to do — but haven’t done yet. What’s keeping you from doing it?
Right now I feel like I am always moving upward and going bigger — but eventually I’d like to go smaller and settle down. I dream of opening my own studio one day. Maybe settle down in a smaller place where the community is vibrant, and run a studio that is more engaged at a local community level. I will get there eventually, but really want to open my network up as much as possible before making a move like that. I am still growing my professional connections and have a lot more great work to do with amazing people first.
How do you imagine your life as a designer 10 years from now will be?
Similar to what I said earlier, I think I’d like to be running my own studio by then. If not, I could always fall into something a lot more meditative and introspective like wood work, or gardening. One thing I have been moving away from is delivering a variety of in the types of work I deliver, and narrow down to one unique thing that I can do really well. I am doing this at my current job, and a lot of people stay at Nike for a long time–so it’s not a stretch to imagine myself improving and perfecting our products for the next ten years. The most important thing is that I build up a body of work that is representative of me and what I specialize in, and that’s all I can hope for.
People and/or designers that inspire you? (personally and professionally)
I try to stay away from idols and legends because your work ends up being so derivative of theirs, or they eventually end up disappointing you in some way… But there are still some people that have consistently inspired me over the course of my career, and they are:
1. — Michael C. Place for his work ethic, and body of work
2. — Debbie Millman for her ideas, opinions and tenacity
3. — Joshua Davis for his innovation in programatic graphic design
4. — Charles & Ray Eames for their playful approach to serious design problems
Where can we find Sebastian Speier?
Instagram: http://instagram.com/startfinish
Tumblr: http://sawedoff.tumblr.com
Medium: https://medium.com/@sspeier
Website: seb.nyc & sspeier.com
Company: Nike & SNKRS
