Naomi María Szczesiul Coale

In layperson terms, what do you actually do at work?

I'm a designer! I work as an in-house designer and my day-to-day is spent on retail product design and packaging design, but sometimes I do some product photography and styling, and occasionally do some digital design work for social media or websites. The majority of what I design is physical products you buy in stores or online and the packaging it comes in. Some of my day is spent working with the marketing team to consider consumer trends, what aesthetics are in style now and predicting what will be popular next, determining consumer demographics, what kind of story we are telling in helping a consumer imagine how the product will exist in their life. I take the parameters from marketing and do my own research to figure out the best qualities, design features, color palettes, textures, and other details that will make our products shine. This involves plenty of sketching, pulling color and material swatches, creating many moodboards of aesthetics, competing products, and inspiration. Then I actually get down to business drawing schematics, creating product design files, fabricating mockups, making revisions, until it's ready for the next phase. Then I have to communicate with our existing manufacturers or find new ones to pick material samples and design our physical prototypes from illustrations and mockups to get to the final product. We will get product samples and ideally the product is perfect and we can move on to packaging and product photography, but sometimes we need to make revisions to manufacturing methods, materials, or colors.