Stephanie Jagiello

I have over a decade of experience in the creative industry. My advice to young creatives is to remain endlessly curious and open to learning. The landscape of creativity is constantly evolving, and staying adaptable allows you to continuously find innovative solutions. Embrace every challenge as an opportunity to grow and remember that your unique perspective is your greatest asset.

Target audience research is key in creating and redesigning a brand identity. Understanding the audience's needs, preferences, and behaviors ensures that the brand resonates with them on a personal level. Ideally, it's about creating connections and experiences that are useful, trustworthy, meaningful and memorable. This research is the foundation that informs every aspect of brand development, from visual identity to messaging. Understanding your audience is foundational in creating a brand identity that's trusted and resonates. Broadly speaking, it's about empathy—placing yourself in the shoes of those you're designing for to ensure your message speaks directly to their desires, needs, and challenges.

It's constantly evolving, but broadly speaking, my creative process has become more collaborative and technology-driven over the years. Initially, it was more about individual creativity, but now it involves leveraging technology and team dynamics to enhance creativity.

My influences are a tapestry of past and present creatives and visionaries and tools.

I draw inspiration from a wide range of sources, including art, instructional design, code, science, geometry, nature, and psychology.

Whether it's visually, illustration style, interface design, color palettes, code + art projects, it's all over the map. I feed and capture my inspirations daily.

Lately I've been influenced visually by digital artists pushing the boundaries of Touch Designer with realtime ai interpolation. Both the input and the output is really interesting. I've also been influenced by AI itself.

For art related visual influences, I am heavily influenced by what design tools like Illustrator are capable of.

For non-digital art, there are too many to list, but I am huge fan of Rex Ray's aesthetic. I decided to really study his work. I recreated a large chunk of the sort of forms he uses in his art, the general Mid-century shapes, translated it into a vector design library, and created svgs in order to see if I could wrap a vector workflow around a paper collage art style. I studied all the materials he uses to construct his art, and did tons of materials tests to get it archival quality and sturdy.

I also really liked the expressive quality of Celia Calle's Illustrations. I studied her work for a while, and trying to capture the loose line gestural comic book style.

I've done the same with traditional Japanese brush painting, and ened up creating a few images combining Celia Calle's sort of loose line forms with the traditional motifs of Japanese ink painting. I've also explored vector illustration of different styles of cartoon characters, anime, graffiti paint effects, pictograms, icons of all kinds.

It's the same with art tools, to get to know them you have to run ton of experiments in every style they are capable of. This is especially true now with AI.

Sanna Annukka's illustrations for Nordstrom Holiday are one of my favorites. She does work for Marimekko, known for their patterns.

If it's UI design, I am really influenced by the environment of the systems we access media on, that means looking to the design guidelines created by those platforms. Your users, in other words, probably experience your work through a computer environment created by Apple, Microsoft, Google, etc. So, those environments heavily influence my design. Google's Material Design Guidelines, Apple Human Interface Guidelines, and Adobe's interpretation of these things for their own guidelines. I love kits and systems. Those are particularly satisfying.

Geometry and units of measure guide UI design and spills out in my artwork.

My creative project have varied widely, so it depends on the type of project, but before starting a new project, this seems obvious, but I'm listening to try to get a sense of feasibility and alignment with my skills. Is it instructional, branding, web UI templates, vector illustration, wireframes, etc. If that seems to be a go, then dive in.

This information helps tune my creative approach to meet their specific needs and objectives.

I dive into understanding the vision, target audience, core values, tech specs. If it's a product UI, I might ask journey map level questions, and think in terms of personas.

Or, if it's a branding related, I might ask questions more specifically around brand, like 'What feeling do you want your brand to evoke?' This helps in crafting a narrative that's both authentic and impactful.

I typically want to understand as much as I can as fast as possible to add value - the customer's vision, goals, and challenges, pacing, communication style. I listen a lot, and do research because typically the client already has a lot of research, and I usually go looking for their existing style to either work with it as a brand elements, or evolve it, or create a new one. I need to figure out about everything from look/feel/mood/brand/content to tech spec limitations, ping for access to existing assets, figure out how to collaborate - Figma, Slack, etc. Broadly speaking, my questions are highly contextual. I ask questions to onboard and define as much information I need to define a deliverable enough to visualize it in high fidelity and create it, "What do you want to achieve with this project?" "Who is our target audience?", "What are the challenges?", "What's our timeline?", "What assets do we have/need?".

If it's a UI design, you can never know enough information. Usually, but not always, I jump in at the point where all the UX insights have been well underway (User Research, Stakeholder Interviews, Personas Creation, User Journey Mapping, Competitive Analysis, Heuristic Evaluation, Workshops and Co-creation Sessions, Usability Testing, Prototyping and Wireframing), and I am typically the visual design creative that takes the research info and/or the creative brief level information, and iterates on the the wireframes or brand elements that will be live and seen by millions online.

Things like brand ads on the Yahoo homepage - Aquos, Walmart, Walgreens, Behr. PayPal emails, PayPal Shopping, the UI for Williams-Sonoma.com. The Consumer Product Safety Commission has this new software that will go in every hospital to report product injuries and they need some interactive instructional design. The first UI for Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport.

Or even things seen by millions eventually... like this new thing called Facebook needs a mock up of what it would be like if they had a thing called a brand page that they can show Apple in order to get it to see the value of an Apple iTunes brand presence on its new student only platform.

Or they need a web-based presentation to show people what Facebook is (and there's not yet a brand established for that). But, I've also helped create visuals for courseware to teach college students about congress, and created EA Games promotional website designs. It's quite varied. Sometimes it's a global brand, and sometimes it's a startup, or an agency, or instructional design studio.

My beginnings in design were marked by a focus on aesthetics and functionality, following educated instinct and following the fun intuitively, without the extensive user data and tools available today. The rise of UX and interaction design has shifted the emphasis towards user-centric approaches, where understanding user behavior and feedback can inform design decisions. This evolution has reinforced the importance of empathy and adaptability in creating intuitive and engaging designs.

, emphasizing that good design starts with understanding human behavior.

My early days in design were characterized by experimental, hands-on approaches, lacking today's plethora of digital tools and design benchmarks. But, in an industry that is always inventing, this experimental foundation has been invaluable, especially in helping to design for new things that didn't exist before.

Designer's starting out today are starting out with pretty elaborated design frameworks established, and tools for almost everything in their pocket.

Among the most valuable lessons I've learned are the importance of shared definitions, communication, the value of feedback, and the necessity of chunking things down continually to keep up the joy of success momentum. Design is in the details and is iterative—success comes from continually defining it, refining and evolving ideas through collaboration and critique. And, probably the most valuable lesson is keep redundant technical systems in case something fails.

My concept of a flexible brand system stems from recognizing the need for flexibility. The various components of a brand’s design system, such as digital standards, APIs, operating system defaults, mobile screen sizes, and technical specifications, allow it to integrate seamlessly into the digital landscape for global visibility.

Given the ever-evolving nature of these environments, it’s crucial for a brand to adopt a flexible approach to remain relevant and responsive.

Creating a flexible design system involves adopting modularity, allowing the system to expand and adapt alongside the brand. A key strategy to achieve this flexibility involves prototyping for diverse use cases, followed by iterative testing and refinement based on feedback.

Beyond the fundamentals, brands should also account for how their identity performs across platforms and contexts beyond their direct control, like social media, APIs, and RSS feeds. This means designing with technical specifications, operating environments, and accessibility standards in mind to ensure compatibility and usability across major digital platforms.

A brand encompasses more than its logo; it represents the company's actions and engagement in the world, serving as both a symbol and a cognitive tool.

When designing a flexible brand system, prioritizing scalability and adaptability is essential. Starting from scratch? Embrace strategies such as designing for the most common defaults, including screen sizes and operating systems, to ensure your designs are minimal yet impactful from the outset. Including a comprehensive library of design elements in various sizes ensures usability and accessibility.

It’s important to provide users with the tools they need, such as templates and icons in all sizes, tailored to meet the brand’s primary use cases. The degree of flexibility required can vary significantly between different types of organizations, like financial institutions versus startups.

At its core, developing a flexible brand system is about crafting a core identity that is both strong and capable of evolving across various media.

To maintain flexibility, focusing on modular design components that can be easily updated or reconfigured without compromising the brand’s core essence is crucial. This methodology supports the brand’s growth and transformation while ensuring consistent and cohesive identity.

Adobe’s recent overhaul of their Spectrum guidelines offers a compelling example of how to engineer flexibility across a broad product range, with accessibility standards playing a pivotal role in harmonizing design elements.

Employing brand repositories and reusable design patterns can significantly streamline the design process, especially when these components are designed to be versatile and targeted.

Laetro maps to this in a lot of ways. It also has the most important ingredient which is a strong POV.

Looking back, I've always collected and curated graphics of various kinds, since early grade school. So, signs point to I've always held a large mental space for artistic visual input. But, it's not until I was in college and studying in the Design and Industry program, and working at a global creative agency, when I got fully immersed, and saw how big a creative project can be. Right out of the gate my work had a global audience. I was inspired by this. And, it's not until recently I realized all the graphics collections I carefully curated as a kid, are kind of a sign.

My approach to client projects is collaborative and iterative. It begins with a deep dive into the client's needs and vision, followed by a phase of brainstorming and conceptual development. I prioritize open communication throughout the process, incorporating client feedback and refining ideas until we achieve a solution that perfectly aligns with their objectives.