This week in our Alumni Series, we are diving into the world of product design, showcasing and chatting to the incredible Marisa Breedt.
Marisa grew up in the town of Empangeni, located in the heart of Zululand, Kwa-Zulu Natal. She was one of 4 children, all of whom had a natural flair for the creative arts. This highlight from her interview on BankTech puts it very well: Having started her professional career as a chef, she eventually found her way into product design, which has grown to be her great passion. She now holds the title of senior product designer and manager at South African design start-up Over, which was notably acquired by the worlds’ largest domain registrar, GoDaddy, in early 2020.
Marisa studied at the Academy and has gone on to do some incredible work in the digital space, which she’s sharing with us today. We thought the best way to do this would be to treat it almost like a short portfolio piece, with work from Marisa followed by her own words explaining just how she went about it. But before your check out her work, why not watch the awesome interview she did with WomenInTech below!
And now, some of Marisa’s work, in her own words.
Graphics content library organisation within the Over iOS app
A project where I redesigned the Graphics Library, with the aim to improve the discoverability within our massive library with over 90k graphics. This included new featured collections, shelves for easy overview and being able to click on individual elements in order to navigate back to the collection it came from.
2020 Trends Kit
Last year at Over, we published our forecasted 2020 Design trends. My responsibility was around the art direction, design and build of the landing page and 10 subpages for each trend which I did using Webflow.
You can see some process work, which includes alternative visual styles that were explored here.
2020 Trend – Phygital Objects
Phygital Objects design trend as part of the series of Over’s 2020 Design Trends Kit⚡️ Just like our website and blog, I built the series using Webflow.
“Movies and games have accelerated 3D animation to a point where hyper-realism doesn’t surprise us anymore. The gap between capturing and creating reality is a very narrow one, and discerning the physical from the digital can require a second or third assessment.
‘Phygital’ emerges as a term to describe this hybrid state.”
Over content in GoDaddy Websites + Marketing
In 2020 Over was acquired by GoDaddy and I was fortunate to have the opportunity to work on the team that focussed on integrating Over into the GoDaddy ecosystem. During this time I stretched both my design and product management muscles with a deep integration of Over content & editing experience right within GoDaddy Websites + Marketing.
You can learn more about the launch of Over into GoDaddy Websites & Marketing here.
Over content in GoDaddy Websites + Marketing Process
As designers, we often put forward our polished designs but being a product designer is much more than the user interface (UI). The real work is in the process behind it, in collaboration with product and engineering teams; scoping the problem space and identifying opportunities. Here you can see we start with collaborative workshops which are now mostly done fully remotely with real time collaboration tools such as Miro and Zoom.
High Level flows are drawn out along with user stories and journeys (user experience), which leads into low and high fidelity prototyping, usability testing and ultimately into the user facing interface design. The UI design process includes all possible scenarios, states, error states and using components from a design system to ensure consistent visual patterns.
22seven website
A website redesign project I did while at 22seven for the public logged out landing pages. We took as an opportunity to soften the brand in order to make it more approachable. The focus was to have an overview of all of the features without being too content heavy.
I built the page(s) (all 60 art-boards) with the Launchpad sketch plugin by Anima App where we exported the code and the developers worked their magic.
Marie Claire – Prix d’ Excellence beauty
When I started as a designer, I was sure I wanted to go into publication and layout design and was very fortunate for the experience at Marie Claire, before I fell in love with digital product design instead. This was for the Prix d’ Excellence beauty awards in the beauty edition.
To see more of what Marisa’s up to why not check her out online?
You can follow her on Twitter here.
You can check out her Instagram account here.
Or you can follow her on Dribbble here.
The Official Stellenbosch Academy Blog 