The Emerald Review

May 22, 2023
What I learned from being Head of Design

The Emerald Review is Boston University’s student-run environmental newspaper. It was the first club I joined in college.

As a freshman, I pitched articles about the Three Gorges Dam and GPT-3. Attempts to redesign the site (a WordPress template), social, and visual identity led me to become Head of Design. In that role I had my first experiences in leading and interviewing candidates for design roles. Which ultimately helped me land my first internship at The Washington Post.

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As a CEO, you’re often trying to share your vision with everyone. You wish everyone was as passionate as you. As the only designer in an organization, you wish you could make everyone a designer, who could make good UX/copy/components with the correct fundamentals of design covered. So when they make a social post on Canva, if brought to critical design review it would have little feedback.

This is hard. Engineering or product hires with taste UNBLOCKS designers from “being designer on everything”, so they can focus on bigger things. Like identity, or the emotional part of an experience, how it feels.

What to look for in designers:

Are you able to build your ideas, in ways that are not brand/customer delight destructive? This can look two ways.

  1. either YOUNG and tech native, least indoctrinated in the old way of doing things, most curious. Energy, intensity, curiosity
  2. or EXPERIENCED with more reps, better intuition to what will be good/delightful experience, able to project themselves into customer easily, switch between 10,000ft view of whole system, how does my decision fit in, switch between altitudes, working year ahead. Super precise decisions. Understand user.