Q&A: Angela He, Product design fellow @ The Atlantic
Each year, Atlantic Media hires around 40 recent graduates for its fellowship program. Fellows are placed in editorial or business positions across Atlantic Media’s five brands: The Atlantic, National Journal, Government Executive, CityLab, and Quartz.
What is your role?
I am the product design fellow. I’m on a team of four designers right now and I basically touch anything that’s a digital product at the Atlantic. I touch any page on the website, app stuff, smart speakers and help design anything digital facing with The Atlantic.
What were you working on right before this interview?
I was working on a set of icons for our help center. I’m designing email and audio icons. Before that I was doing audio article stuff, so I’m doing some signaling design for that.
We’re trying to convey that audio articles exist. We need to label it on the site somehow without disrupting how the rest of the site looks. So that means providing cues, whether that’s a symbol or a notation that says “audio.” We’re exploring different ways that could look on the site right now.
What did you study in school, and where did you learn to design this kind of stuff?
I was a computer science and visual arts double major in college, so two opposite ends of the spectrum — very technical on one side with the computer science and very creative with the visual arts. Product design is somewhere in the middle; I’m doing design work for tech. I’m not coding necessarily, but I’m also not doing fine arts. It’s a lot of problem solving with developers, product managers and editors, and creating designs for people through that.
How did you find out about the fellowship?
I’m one of the very few people who found the job through LinkedIn. The fellowship position that I found was just a product design fellowship position, so my process was a little different. My role was so specific that I would not have been interested in the other fellowship roles.
What’s your dream job?
If I could do anything… I really miss making art. I would love to get back into pottery and sculpture, which is stuff I did in college. My dream job would be to be a super successful Etsy business owner and have my own studio, making stuff and freelancing my own art.
What is the best advice that someone’s ever given you?
Someone told me to never hold back my questions because of someone’s title or position. A perceived hierarchy in a company or organization shouldn’t stop you from getting to know someone or asking questions. In college I struggled with that a little bit because I often did not know how to approach people who had a lot more experience than me, or who knew so much. But here I’m trying to not hesitate in approaching someone.
Where did you work before you came to the Atlantic?
I did a lot of tech jobs, so I was doing a lot of front-end engineering. My last “job job” was front-end engineering for a company called Concur that does travel and expense software. I was coding stuff for their website.
What is the coolest thing that you’ve done since the fellowship?
I helped with the Ideas section launch and the design for the article page for that. They wanted something that made Ideas articles feel and look different from other articles on the Atlantic. We did a lot of interviews with different people and a lot of brainstorming and mock-ups and different design iterations, and we came up with this article design that features the author really prominently. We did a lot of user testing with that — interviews, tons of different combinations for how it looked — and I’m really glad with how it came out.
Do you have any advice for people seeking entry level jobs in media and product design?
Cast your net really wide and don’t be afraid to look at random spots on the Internet. I looked at really big recruiting sites like LinkedIn and went to college career fairs, but I also looked at really niche sites, like Design Gigs for Good. If you can narrow down your passions and your interests and find more niche positions that not everyone is applying to that are really tailored towards you, that will be really helpful.