AIGA/NY hosted its fourth annual In-The-House design panel on Thursday, March 27, 2014 at the Parsons Tishman auditorium. This year’s focus, Culture, Connectivity and Content featured Derek Scott of Instagram, Renda Morton of The New York Times, and Joe Marianek formerly of Apple. Designer, educator, writer and podcaster Debbie Millman moderated the event.

Millman began with a few words about the practice of in-house design. She reviewed complaints from in-house designers: bureaucracy, office politics, monotony, and the difficulty of landing an agency or studio job afterward. Despite this, Millman added, “at this very moment in time, over 50% of all professional designers in the united states are employed as in house designers.”

She quoted Julia Hoffmann, Creative Director at Etsy: “In-house design studios are the future of successful branding. A strong in-house designer knows and cares about the brand and becomes a steward of the organization, leading the company in achieving design excellence.” Millman concluded, “The three in-house designers here today are proof positive that this is 100% true.”

Derek Scott | Instagram

Instragram’s mission, Derek Scott explained, is “to capture and share the world’s moments” while adhering to three core concepts. The first is simplicity: the interface shows only one square image at a time, and the company deflects requests for custom filters or new commenting features. “It’s very pure,” said Scott. Next, creativity, “we set the bar high from the very beginning. When Kevin [Systrom] created Instagram, he hand-picked the first 100 content creators to show the types of content that we want, which sparked Instagram into becoming what it is today.” Lastly, community: The intimacy of Instagram, Scott argued, comes from “knowing that we all have the same camera in our pockets…that if we were there in that moment in time, we could have captured that ourselves.”

As a creative strategist, Scott’s primary role is to teach companies how Instagram can help them build their brands. “Sometimes I miss getting my hands dirty,” he mused, and explained that Instagram’s in-house designers work on product design, art direction of Instagram’s photographers, and building sample campaigns for clients.

Renda Morton | The New York Times

“Our goal as designers at The New York Times,” said Renda Morton, “is to balance the goals of our business side and newsroom while advocating for the best reader and user experience. We represent all of her readers in absentia.”

Morton is a digital designer for the newspaper’s web platform, and she shared some highlights of the story page’s recent redesign. Her team built an extremely flexible template, with over 100 different layouts to accommodate various image shapes and sizes.

The team also incorporated more typefaces, moving closer to the wide range used in the print publication. Stay tuned for additional changes to the web platform as well, “We’re going to continue to iterate on this, because we never want to have a redesign ever again!” said Morton.

As for what some of the other digital design teams do, some focus on specific content. These designers create a special look and feel for items such as the “Invisible Child” feature earlier this year about Dasani, a homeless girl living in Fort Greene, or the Sunday Magazine’s visual columns such as “Eat” and “Who Made That?” The product team, on the other hand, designs and launches new products aimed at growing the Times’ audience, such as the NYT NOW app released just last week.

Joe Marianek | Apple

“I love Apple,” declared Joe Marianek. Yet he was the aware of the potential downsides of moving in-house when he left Pentagram for Apple. “A lot of people said to me, if you go to Apple you won’t get to be creative any more,” he explained. “But that’s not true. There’s a lot of invention at Apple.” The company welcomes fresh concepts from its employees, and ideas are literally “always on the wall” in the Apple office. “No matter what level you are, you can contribute,” said Marianek.

While working on the iOS7 launch, Marianek contributed to a complete reinvention of the iPhone’s visual design. He also helped put together an eye-opening video showing the production process for the new Mac Pro.

For Marianek, the move from Pentagram to Apple also meant a move from New York City to San Francisco. From California transportation (“It’s a real car culture, the kind of place where you either own a Honda or a Maserati”) to the uniformly branded campus (“There is a lot of Myriad at Apple”), this west coast world felt different to Marianek. Most of all, he was struck by the great sense of togetherness at Apple — not only socially, at the campus cafeterias squash courts, but also professionally, “it’s the community of people that make the company what it is, and makes it fun to to work there,” Marianek explained. “When you’re in-house you’re all doing the same thing. It can sometimes get monotonous, and you all have to challenge each other to work and think outside of that.”

Additional Information:
Instagram
The New York Times
Derek Scott
Renda Morton
Joe Marianek and what he’s doing after Apple

Event Details:

 AIGA/NY In-The-House IV: Culture, Connectivity and Content

Event Photos:

Click here to view all photos from AIGA/NY In-The-House IV: Culture, Connectivity and Content on Flickr. 
To view additional photos, or to contribute your photos, visit our AIGA New York Flickr group.

Special thanks to contributing writer Karen Vanderbilt for the AIGA/NY In-The-House IV: Culture, Connectivity and Content event recap and photos. Karen can be found at karenvanderbilt.com, @k_vanderbilt and Studio Kudos.