Sydney Simmons-Nelson: 6 Years Taller

Little Taller: How has your role evolved over the past year, and what new skills or responsibilities have you taken on?

Sydney: Last year I feel like a lot of the focus was getting things done, but this year really shifted to research and suggestions for clients. Beyond what looks best, I'm guiding clients toward what functions best and why, looking at what others have done and what actually works. I had a couple clients I was able to help with design and make those suggestions and be on calls with them to go through that. Beyond that, allowing myself time for research and mood boarding and building designs from the ground up vs starting with some light designs have improved my work and knowledge this year.

Little Taller: What project or client engagement from the past year stands out as your favorite, and why did it resonate with you?

Sydney: Two projects really stood out to me this year: Allir and Voxie. Allir has been fun starting with one idea for an app and watching it grow and develop into what it is now. It's been the main project where I've gotten to do a lot of research and ideation to figure out what we're doing. Now that we can go farther with development, pushing what we can do on design has been amazing instead of having to scale back for dev.

Voxie was fun going in because I don't work in marketing design much, so there was a lot of uncertainty for me, but being able to rework the ebooks into something they love and getting so much praise about the offsite designs made me realize even if it's scary doesn't mean I don't know what I'm doing.

Little Taller: Share a challenge you faced this year and how you overcame it. What did you learn from that experience?

Sydney: One thing I really struggled with was just sharing my work. If something isn't perfect I don't want anyone to see it, so just sharing something in its messiest or earliest state and workshopping from there was scary but it ended up being worth it in the end since they knew where I was at and we could collaborate from there into something better before it was too polished. Sometimes letting go of control can be beneficial (who knew!)

Little Taller: Little Taller places a big emphasis on ownership and orchestration. How have you seen this reflected in your daily work and how has it impacted your work output this year?

Sydney: I've been taking more ownership over my schedule, with helping out the design team and figuring out design process. Over my own tasks I've been able to break them down into what's needed and schedule them out and do the same for when I pass tasks off to another designer. Being on client calls to walk through design recommendations and doing research, documentation, and moodboarding to make strategic suggestions has helped me drive the direction of designs and make a case for them and why. This has let me really own the project as a whole vs just doing what makes sense visually.

Little Taller: Looking ahead, what aspects of your professional life are you most excited about developing further in the coming year?

Sydney: I'm excited about growth and becoming more sure in myself. After working in marketing design more it doesn't feel as scary and it's something that I can do. But I'm just excited to keep learning new tools (like After Effects and improving in Jitter) and what the clients have in store for us. Hopefully becoming more sure in myself means I'll feel less reactive to tasks and scattered and go into it knowing that I know what I'm doing.