Designing at a Software Company

Entering a software company as a designer has been by far the most challenging experience of my career. When I joined Orange Logic I was the only designer. There was minimal guidance in a company experiencing explosive growth within an engineering culture.

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Ramping up Design

Orange Logic was growing due to the brain child product of its intellectual CEO who had been nurturing the Digital Asset Management tool "Cortex" for over 20 years. This was a critical stage in the company. Employees were being hired on a monthly, if not weekly, basis. Cortex had become an extremely powerful tool, but it faced an issue that was mine to solve – people didn't understand how to use it.

My first attempts at improving the design of Cortex often lead to getting shot down because my designs didn't account for the plethora of scenarios each component was used in. I realized before I could be effective at improving the experience I had to deeply understand the product.

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Journey to Understanding Cortex's Architecture

I started working on smaller projects like redesigning a single component and understanding how that connected to other features. From there a larger component, and then designing a full page... a workflow with multiple pages... and eventually a new tool inside of Cortex used to build forms. Designing hundred page websites built on content management systems was easy compared to understanding how to design within the complex constraints of Cortex.

Along this path understanding Cortex's systems I built a scalable design system in Figma so components could be reused as new features were designed.

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1 Year at Orange Logic

A year into working at Orange Logic I look back to see what has been accomplished so far with pride:

• Design system built from scratch in Figma mimicking the product's architecture
• Custom workflows for Fortune 500 customers (Mostly Hulu & Facebook)
• Polling application designed as a quick standalone internal tool
• Form builder tool designed for customizing Cortex
• Branding & Logo redesign for Orange Logic
• Website redesign for Orange Logic

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Continuing to Learn & Grow

As this journey continues it's humbling to realize how far you can push yourself under the right circumstances. Being pushed further than I thought was possible has forced me to design my way into creating new systems for being more productive in Figma, and in Cortex.

With all of this growth there is still so much more to understand. It's important to remember this journey of growth never ends – so run it like a marathon, not a sprint.