Now that hybrid-working is here to stay, the ways an employee presents themselves and their company on screen matters more.
Worklife | July 20, 2022 | by Cloey Callahan | hybrid-working | Business Insurance
Strong presentation and graphic design skills have typically gone hand in hand with certain commercial or creative design roles that require them. Now, they’re being regarded as skills that every employee should sharpen, in order to excel in a hybrid or remote working setup.
That’s why some businesses are calling for design literacy to be baked in at the onboarding stage.
“How do you speak to others through graphic design, or design in general, at a time when we’re more remote than ever?” said Steven Heller, author of “Design Literacy: Understanding Graphic Design.”
Heller compares graphic design to going into a showroom and picking out furniture or going to a clothing store and picking out what you want. “You start thinking ‘how am I presenting myself,’” said Heller. “It’s easy to call it branding now, only because the term is used so prevalently, but it’s really just creating a style for yourself and that’s been done for ages … You make it your own.”
At Canva, a visual communications platform for designers and non-designers alike, all new hires, of which there were 700 this year alone, go through a design school, regardless of position, where they’re taught frameworks for creating slides with a narrative vs. information mindset. They’re also sent weekly design tips from the creative team. The design school also goes over how to prepare fonts, how to choose colors, and more. It concludes with the new hire presenting to their team.
“Design literacy is becoming more important as the world has become more visual,” said Canva’s chief marketing officer Zach Kitschke. “We’ve seen this massive transformation in the past few years and the way we all communicate and live our lives look completely different. The hybrid world has become one where visual forms of communication, whether it’s presentations or video content or graphics – different ways of communicating a message — have become vital.”
