Deel Brand + Illustration
A b2b love story.
Role(s): Brand Designer 21’-23’ + Creative Lead 23’-present
Since 2018 Deel has aimed to make the hiring, onboarding, and payroll of global employees and contractors as easy as a 5 minute workflow. This includes the often overlooked (but crucial) step of ensuring that employers are compliant with international labor and tax laws in the localities in which they are hiring.
I was brought on in May of 2021 as a Senior Brand Designer and Deel's first in-house brand design hire. The early days involved my hands in every piece of the pie, from sales enablement to web, product, social, paid ads and out of home campaigns. I started as employee 150 and since then we have grown to more than 4000 employees, acquired 15 companies and scaled our product to serve as a full stack HR tech product for global teams.
The company and the brand have been through a variety of stages, each built upon our learnings shepherding a brand through such monumental growth. The systems, priorities, and processes that worked for a company of 400 proved unsustainable as the company grew and the brand needed to grow with it. The crucible of hypergrowth taught us a number of lessons about the non-negotiability of approaching brand creative with a holistic lens, the importance of complimentary skillsets when building out the team, and the responsibility we have as designers to dig deeper to uncover the root need when solving design problems.
The design team has grown and I now wear less hats than I once did. I currently have the privilege to lead the Illustration and Motion team and head up tier 1 go-to-market campaigns, ensuring that our brand creative stays in alignment with our core values, business objectives, and brand guidelines. One particular area of interest and a way that I proactively strive to bridge the gap between a team of wildly creative right brainers and the left brain world of B2B SaaS is taking a data informed approach to design decisions. This starts with understanding the “why” behind the ask through clearly linking requests to a larger business objective, asking the right questions to uncover the underlying problem requiring a solution, clear prioritization, and using analytics to advocate for good design. This relieves the cognitive load that designers innately carry (and can cause decision fatigue when the scope is undefined and the ask vague), and allows them to focus on what they do best; creative solutions. This overall framework can be applied in varying flavors of rigidity to everything from celebratory payday gifs to event booths, to paid ads.
Deel is still a startup at heart and designers are expected to pitch in where and when they are needed. This dynamic flow of skills and ideas keeps every day unique and most days full of the right kind of challenges.
