Vudu
Creative Director
Summary
In 2015 I joined Vudu, a subsidiary of Walmart which distributes movies & TV shows online. During my tenure here, I’ve progressed from a Senior Visual Designer to an Art Director. I was most recently tasked with providing brand direction across all areas of our company as well as taking visual lead on all executive vision projects which pertain to Vudu as well as the larger organization.
My roleCreative Director
For 5 years, my main role was to be an advocate for design in a company that was historically run by engineers. In order to gain control over design at Vudu, I needed to get executive, product & engineering buy in and convince them how design helps the bottom line. This ultimately requires doing favors for multiple teams and trying to manage my team of designers time. I was often and still am in the weeds from time to time cranking out design assets for our marketing team while simultaneously providing insight for vision projects for our CEO and execs from our larger organization, Walmart.
Problems They never end
The biggest problem I've faced is the political advocacy of design within our company. In order to secure a healthy future for design, I would often have to create 3x the amount of work that was required. 1) Create what was asked of me 2) Create my ideal vision of a project / feature / etc 3) Some sort of compromise between 1 and 2. The system worked and our execs bought into our idea that design should come first. As a result, our design team has grown from 3 to a lean team of 14 and our designs have improved thanks to measurable data around something as subjective as what color something should be.
Evolution5 Year Brand Progression
Over the course of 5 years, the Vudu brand evolved twice. The first evolution named "Blue Steel" (after Zoolander) employed the use "sparkies" as a nod to the larger Walamrt organization in an attempt to align with the larger brand. The second evolution was named "inception" as an attempt to separate our brand from Walmart due to the emergence of Walmart Video (a white label version of Vudu). Inception employed the use of shapes composed of shapes from the Vudu logo with an emphasis on angles from the Vudu "V."
EfficiencyDesign System
In order to create an efficient workflow, a design system was created. With buy in from engineering, we started to implement this design system to avoid redundancies and re-creating the same elements over and over again. During the initial creation of our design system, we had the opportunity to learn from Brad Frost (Author of Atomic Design) during Walmart's annual design summit. Some of the tools we utilized for the creation of this system are: Sketch Libraries, a foray into Invision's Design System Manager and Abstract.
See it in action
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