MessageBird Design Approach: Our interview with Daniel Haire
At MessageBird we approach every possible aspect of our brand and user experience from a humanistic standpoint, to help keep our services as accessible as possible. Throughout the coming weeks we’ll be sharing our ongoing experimentations with infusing personality and relatability into our platform.
Our products are technical by nature, but their functionality is beneficial to non-technical people as well, so we structure our user experience in a way that’s friendly and approachable. We like to keep our visual assets clean and consistent, and we deliver our narratives through simplified copy alongside complimentary detailed illustrations. When it comes to creating illustrations, we love working with freelance designers — not only do they deliver excellent imagery, they also contribute invaluable outsiders’ input to our pages.
We recently collaborated with Daniel Haire, an ever so talented designer based out of Atlanta, Georgia. He created our developer portal illustration a few months back, and we really enjoyed having his input throughout the process of creating the page. But we were curious to hear how things went from his perspective, what he thought of our products, what his process is like, so on and so forth. Well, we sent over a list of candid questions to learn a bit more about Daniel and how the collaboration went on his end. Here’s the result!
What’s your favorite theme to design?
Lately I’ve been heavily inspired by the occult and paranormal imagery. It’s permeated through most areas of my life and design is certainly one of them. This theme is mostly injected into my personal work though I find any opportunity I can to hide an eyeball*, moon, or spellbook in client work.
*See if you can find the eye in our dev portal illustration!
What’s the funniest thing you’ve been asked to design?
At a previous app startup, I was always asked to illustrate some off-the-wall content our users came up with. A few notables that come to mind: an angry punk rock milk carton, a gravestone with wifi, and farts that were the ghosts of food. Needless to say it was a great job.
What motivates you to design as a freelancer for companies?
There’s such a wide variety of work out there for designers/illustrators, I think that’s the main reason I love to freelance. One week I can be working on super serious icons for a financial app and the next week I’m drawing three-eyed cats shaped like fortune cookies. As an in-house designer, depending on the company, it’s hard to work outside the confines of the brand. If it’s a straight-laced B2B app, there’s little room for working on designs of a more whimsical nature.
What did you think of MessageBird when we first contacted you?
Admittedly, I did some creeping around before even responding to the first email. One of the first things I saw was a “Get shit done” shirt on the MessageBird instagram. It was love at first sight.
How do you prefer to receive feedback on your work? Take us through your process of interpreting and implementing our feedback.
The most effective way for me to receive feedback is over Google Hangouts/Skype with a marked up comp of a design I sent over. That’s without a doubt the most confusion-free and pleasant form of feedback I could ask for. Those feedback sessions tend to be more conversational and we’re always able to figure out changes and new direction exceedingly faster than responding to an ever growing email chain. I actually used the Skype method with Joey and Inês, it was painless and enjoyable.
What elements of MessageBird did you keep in mind while you were creating illustrations for us? (i.e. Our company values? The functionality of our products? Our users? etc.)
The illustrations I did were mostly centered around the product functionality and how that could be presented in an engaging way to the users. I enjoyed working with the MessageBird blue as well. The product is used for communication and it was fun to re-envision that concept in a new way.
What challenges did you face throughout your collaboration with our design team?
Working with the team was an absolute breeze, I’m struggling to come up with anything. I think the only challenge would be the time difference. I’m a really late sleeper and it typically takes me about 2 hours to even remotely function like a human in the morning. Any time we needed to jump on a Skype call I had to wake up slightly earlier than usual. Ranked on a scale, this challenge would be a few tick marks beneath “mildly inconvenient”, that is to say, it was totally fine!
What’s unique about working with our design team?
I really enjoyed the team’s enthusiasm! Sometimes it’s difficult to distill a tone from an email chain, but with the MessageBird team I was always aware of the excitement and drive everyone had. It was an awesome energy that always put me in the zone to crank out illustrations.
We were happy to read these responses, and we’re thrilled with the results of our joint project. Big shout out to Daniel for taking the time to do this interview. Maybe you’ll be seeing some more of his work on our pages in the future… time will tell!
