Meet: Alec Schmidt, Visual Designer
By: Tina Xu
Tags: Visual Design, Interview, Work, Stories, Design

Alec joined the design team in March 2018. I recently caught up with him to talk about challenging visual design homogeneity, using the written word to construct better visual narratives, and developing an illustration system.

Alec ☝

What do you want to state for the record about yourself?

My name is Alec with a “C”.

Tell me what you do at Envoy?

I’m a visual designer, so I create things ranging from swag designs and illustrations to fliers and marketing pages, while also refining Envoy’s visual language.

So what does a “visual language” mean, anyway?

To me, for a technology company, a visual language can be separated into two big parts. The first would be what the interface looks like and the look and feel of the things you use to navigate, read, touch, and click. The second part is the graphic representation of things, whether that be photos or illustrations.

What do you think is the biggest stereotype about designers?

That we’re all calculated and analytical. I think there are a lot of designers that take more of a free-wheeling and artful approach to things.

Where do you place yourself between those two?

I’d say I started where the stereotype is because I got super into Product Design. Then I found myself wanting to go back to being more free-form and able to express ideas rather than analyze things.

Backtracking a bit, how did you end up in design?

I played in punk bands when I was younger and I vividly remember my first foray into “design” as a super special moment in my life. There was a kid in another band who was known for making fliers for all the bands in Albuquerque. I hit him up and asked to make the flier for their first show, but he emailed me back saying, no thanks. But I felt compelled to do it anyway so I stayed up all night and designed the most terrible flier ever.

I also learned HTML/CSS accidentally through fiddling with MySpace theme generators. I had no idea what they were, but when you make two or three of them you start seeing patterns. And I was customizing MySpace pages for a year without realizing that was CSS. I didn’t even really know what HTML and CSS meant. And when I did start learning about HTML/CSS it clicked that it was the same stuff that I was messing around with on MySpace. Eventually, I cared about design a lot more than anything else and shifted focus.

You were a product designer at one point, and also a brand designer. What led you to visual design? What do you think are the biggest differences?

I began as a visual designer and eventually made my way into product as the practice grew in popularity. I really started to miss the visual side after a while and found myself pretty burnt out, so I decided to start making my way back to the visual side of things. I think the biggest difference is that product design is more interactive and exists through a flow the user has to go through, whereas visual design isn’t as interactive and often involves more traditional graphic design.

What are you working on right now?

My main focus right now is defining an illustration style for Envoy with Amy Devereux. It’s been a fun project but extremely challenging. I’m also working on a clothing brand outside of Envoy that I hope to launch in the new year.

Alec references a couple of Amy’s illustrations (bottom left) while working on a new illustration

What’s a misconception about visual designers and the work that visual designers do?

That we are all graphic designers and we can all draw pictures effortlessly. In the process of developing our new illustration style, Amy and I are constantly reminded that hands and eyes are so hard to draw. I am super strong in the typography and layout world. Amy can whip up a webpage in a day. Doing a full illustration seems easy, but is very daunting. But I think a lot of people just assume any visual designer can easily produce stuff like that.

What’s the most challenging part of being a visual designer?

Staying ahead or away from trends. It’s super easy these days to “phone it in” and just copy something’s style from Dribbble or Instagram. I think the biggest challenge is staying creative and trying things that aren’t inspired by what everyone else is doing, especially in today’s social/digital landscape. Staying current and informed without following trends. Pushing the envelope a bit in the best way possible.

Especially early on, Amy and I were pretty clear about the style that we wanted to avoid, like the tiny head and wonky body style that a lot of big companies are doing right now. The best visual designers, in my opinion, are the people who see those trends and use parts of them but are taking it a step beyond. Part of that is being confident in what you’re doing. It’s going to be different and there’s no way to gauge anything about it until you put it out there. You see the “Dribbblization of design”. You see everyone doing the same thing, but the visual designers taking it a step beyond are the people that I respect the most.

How do you translate abstract concepts into visuals?

Lots and lots and lots of Google image searches and sketching, and Noun Project searches, and sketching, and searching other weird image galleries, and more sketching. I draw a lot of small sketches representing the concepts, and then I mix them together in a way that makes sense visually.

Have you ever encountered creative blocks or burnout? How did you go about it?

Many times. I think when someone is truly burnt it’s best to take some time off, go on a short vacation or do some self-care and detach yourself from the problem. I’m a big fan of exercise, particularly running. I try and detach myself from whatever I’m working on and get some stress off my shoulders. I also read a lot of comics or play video games to detach and get re-inspired.

What’s your favorite project you’ve worked on at Envoy?

Our core value notebooks. They took a lot of effort to complete but the result was well worth it. For me, they were worth the extra effort because I’ve never worked on a “set” of something like this before, and the idea I had going into the project was fully realized instead of sacrificing things along the way. Honestly one of my favorite things I’ve ever worked on.