BDC Email Newsletters Design In Collaboration with Illustrator Ernie Parada
PROJECT OVERVIEW
Project Info Eliana Feng Founded the first ever design community at BlackRock: BlackRock Design Community (BDC).
Project Label Design Leadership, Email Newsletter Design
Timeline June 2018 to March 2019
Role & Responsibilities
Eliana Feng — created the vision and execution plan for developing a global network of designers at BlackRock.
Ernie Parada — illustrations.
Discovering the problem
When I first joined the firm and after learning more about the company structure, I realized that because there was not a centralized design team, designers don’t know who are the designers in the company.
addressing community needs
After talking to numerous designers at BlackRock, I also discovered that:
Design teams don’t know what each other is working on. As a result, it has happened that different teams worked on duplicate projects.
Designers don’t know who to talk to for certain design resources.
Different design teams have worked in silos. There is a great need to ensure consistent design system across the firm.
Furthermore, designers at BlackRock feel that they are far away from the bottomline of the business.
Therefore, I realized there is an urgent need for a channel or multiple channels for designers at BlackRock to come together, to communicate and to collaborate.
creat community vision
The purpose of BlackRock Design Community is to connect and empower the design community at BlackRock. Ultimately, all of us together can build a design-driven culture at BlackRock and use design thinking to impact the bottom line of the business.
Built a global network of designers
Among the 15,000 global employees at BlackRock, designers are not only scattered around the global but also across different departments.
One of the first steps is to reach out to each team and collaborate with HR to make sure that the community includes every designer. However, some of the difficulties that I ran into is that there were people who weren’t designers by title but they were involved in design and would like to consider themselves as designers. Therefore, I revisited the goal of this community, which is to build not only a design community, but also a community of people who is interested in participating and promoting design thinking and design-driven culture. The goal is to be inclusive.
Created community newsletters
Other than helping establish community chatroom, I took the initiate to create and execute the design and content development for BDC email newsletters. The content for the newsletter is to directly address the greater community needs, to learn: who are the other designers at BlackRock? what are other design teams working on? what are the design resources that we can share among us?
Results
The community newsletter gained traction after the second issue:
More efficient collaboration between different design teams (we know where the design resources are, and we know who to reach out to for certain design resources).
Non-designers have reached out to me who would like to also be included in the design community and community newsletter.
Besides continuing developing the BDC newsletters, I am helping organize the first BCD Townhall meeting where all the design teams in NY would come together for the first time. I am also brainstorming the details of the first firm wide Design-a-thon with other designers.