Q&A with Industry Dive staff visual designer Brian Tucker
This is a Q&A with Brian Tucker, a staff visual designer who works on Industry Dive’s Brand & Marketing Design team.
What is your story? How did you end up in the design field? How did you end up at Industry Dive, a business media company?
I began playing around in the Adobe suite at a very young age, and I used that skill set throughout middle and high school to earn some cash doing designs and simple websites. After high school, I attended design school and started working as a full-time designer concurrently. Unfortunately, that job was entirely unenjoyable, but it taught me more than school ever did.
The practical experience — and being left to figure things out on my own — shaped me into a self-starter who loves to look for problems to solve. From my understanding, it’s this very skill set that landed me a job at Industry Dive.
I moved to DC looking to find a company that would appreciate my skills and give me room to grow into different areas of design. Industry Dive gave me that opportunity. A lot of things attracted me: a great business model, a design department that reports directly to C-suite, and a fantastic company culture.
When you first started at Industry Dive in 2018, what was the company like? What was your role like?
How things have changed! When I was hired, I went from being a solo designer to being on a team of four, which was huge to me at the time. Now we have three separate teams within the design department with more designers than I can count.
The work has also significantly changed over the years. I’ve designed white papers for some of the biggest companies in the world, created illustrations for stories that have won the highest awards in business journalism, worked on Capitol Hill as a photojournalist, drafted office floor plans, and so much more. The variety has made this such an exciting and fulfilling job.
What is your role like today, as a staff visual designer on Industry Dive’s Brand & Marketing Design team?
I still work on a large variety of work, but I’ve reigned it in from the earlier days, opting to go deeper on some key skills that interest me. Thinking in systems comes naturally to me, so I spend a lot of my time creating systems for internal processes to help empower non-designer employees and increase the efficiency of visual asset creation.
I also shifted my focus to web-based work. I spend much of my time in Figma and Webflow. My coworkers can attest to my loud and persistent pitching of Webflow to solve any given problem. These tools allow me to take a complex project from concept to completion without having to ask for help from our engineering department; this has been a game changer.
You have experienced a lot of change at Industry Dive over the past four years; the company has grown from around 100 people to over 400. Industry Dive has acquired multiple companies and has been sold twice. We have also restructured the design department multiple times. What were some of the biggest challenges you encountered as the business scaled?
It doesn’t feel good when something you just finished making becomes obsolete, but it can feel like that happens a lot when your company quickly scales. If you keep finding yourself in that situation, it’s time to pivot your thinking to systems and automation.
Industry Dive’s business model makes this absolutely necessary. We have 27 publications, and we are launching more each year. This means asking yourself when you start a project: “Is this something that can easily be done 27+ times?”
If the answer is no, it’s time to come up with another solution. I spend a lot of my time puzzling over scalable design solutions, and it’s by far the biggest challenge I’ve faced at Industry Dive.
Of all the work you have done at Industry Dive, what are you most proud of?
That’s a tough one, as I’ve been able to work on so many cool projects with so many cool clients!
Two stand out to me, though:
Our internal Diversity Inclusion and Belonging (DIB) group banded together to help a nonprofit called Dream Between the Lines. This nonprofit provides books for underprivileged children in New York. This project had volunteers from nearly every department at the company come together to create a website for them! I tag-teamed the design with Michelle Rock, our Senior Director of Brand and Marketing Design, and met with leaders from Dream Between the Lines to bring their vision to reality. It was amazing to see so many people across the company come together to make a difference.
Another project is the redesign of IndustryDive.com, which we completed earlier this year. This was such a difficult project; we had to navigate the interests of lots of stakeholders, answer fundamental questions about how we should frame the business, and figure out how to handle all of the legacy content. It was a beast to make progress on, but we got it out the door in three months. I’m excited about all the iterative upgrades we have in store for the future.
What are some ways you feel like you’ve grown, professionally, since you started at Industry Dive?
My professional growth since joining Industry Dive is hard to overstate. I joined the company with technical knowledge and design skills, but I was lacking in several important areas: operational expertise, client communication, confidence, and systems thinking.
While working here, I have made huge leaps in these areas. The best part is that I still see an exciting amount of growth in my future. This year I am kicking off several ambitious projects that will automate some of our most time-consuming collateral pieces. I’m already learning and growing through these projects, and I can’t wait to see what’s around the next corner.
