# Come to work with me! 🎨 Creative Director Diaries ## Метаданные - **Канал:** CharliMarieTV - **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JDW72mKQP0 - **Дата:** 06.02.2025 - **Длительность:** 22:58 - **Просмотры:** 8,911 ## Описание First vlog of 2025! Come along for my first week back at work after the holidays, as I document what it's really like being Creative Director at Kit. From managing 800+ job applications to running team meetings and trying to stay focused on strategic work - this is an honest look at creative leadership in tech. After taking a break from YouTube during a year of burnout recovery (while leading Kit's rebrand!), I'm going back to my channel's roots: sharing the real behind-the-scenes of working in design. Except now it's from a leadership perspective. Want to see more of my work as Creative Director? Let me know what you're curious about in the comments! LINKS Kit rebrand documentary series: https://kit.com/rebranding-in-public Biggest project of my career story time: https://youtu.be/-3QGjCidNb4 2024 Income report: https://youtu.be/QAnkqobtHN0 Analog to-do list cards: https://ugmonk.com/en-es/pages/analog Design Life podcast episode on 2025 goals: https://www.designlife.fm/episode/304-setting-our-goals-and-intentions-for-2025 TIMESTAMPS: 0:00 - What to expect from these videos 3:46 - The first day back at work 11:37 - Team rituals retro meeting plan (& results) 14:45 - Dealing with too many requests 16:45 - Improving 1 on 1s 19:52 - TGIF 22:15 - Real talk Please remember to click subscribe if you'd like to see more of my videos. -------------------------------- // WANT TO SUPPORT MY CHANNEL? Check out my digital products: Handwritten font: https://charlimarie.com/font Scribbles vector pack on Figma: https://charli.link/scribbles Scribbles vector pack as images: https://charli.kit.com/products/scribbles Personal brand on-demand workshop: https://charlimarie.com/personal-brand-workshop Or, if you like, you can put something in my tip jar right here: https://pages.charlimarie.com/products/tips Sharing my videos or recommending my channel to a design friend is also very much appreciated! :) -------------------------------- // ABOUT ME I'm Charli and I'm designer from New Zealand currently living in Valencia, Spain. I’m the Creative Director at a remote tech company called Kit and I post videos about the design projects I work on and the tools I use, as well as vlogs of my life as a designer. 💬 Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/charlimarie.bsky.social 📷 Instagram: http://instagram.com/charliprangley -------------------------------- // MORE Join my free marketing design newsletter: https://charli.link/newsletter My site & blog: https://charlimarie.com Design Life podcast: https://designlife.fm Inside Marketing Design podcast: https://insidemarketingdesign.co/ -------------------------------- // TECH & TOOLS 📹 Get links to all the tech hardware I use to make my videos (and the art on my gallery wall!) right here: https://charlimarie.com/shopmyoffice 💻 Software I use: Webflow (no-code website builder)*: https://charli.link/webflow Premiere Pro (video editing)*: https://charli.link/premierepro Adobe Audition (audio recording)*: https://charli.link/audition After Effects (intro animation)*: https://charli.link/aftereffects Figma (web design): https://charli.link/figma Photoshop (thumbnails)*: https://charli.link/photoshop Kit (marketing platform): https://charli.link/try-kit Riverside (podcast interview recording)*: https://charli.link/riverside Music in this video from Epidemic Sound*: https://charli.link/epidemicsound Video captions by Rev (very cost effective service! I recommend)*: https://charli.link/videocaptions Links marked with a * are affiliate links. I can't believe you read the whole description box! You get a ⭐️ ## Содержание ### [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JDW72mKQP0) What to expect from these videos happy 2025 everybody and welcome to my first Vlog of the year it is my first day back at work after a 3E break I just spent 3 weeks in New Zealand with my family completely signed off from work and so I know that I'm going to have a lot to catch up on today and it's also my first YouTube video for several months and so we have a lot to catch up on as well which we'll get into in this video but first I'm going to go make a coffee cuz I feel like that is going to be necessary to get through today okay so what have you missed that I should fill you in on the first thing that came to mind is I dyed my hair I'm not sure if that's important to tell you but yes it is darker got rid of the blonde I'll more important things though if you missed it definitely go watch my income report video cuz that was a good like summary of what the year past year has been like for me with bone out recovery and uh the impact that that's had on my ability to make content like this it's honestly a real shame that I was in a state of burnout and not able to really document a lot last year because I went through the most transformational year ever in completing the Rebrand from convert kit to Kit I am so freaking proud of that project I learned so much through it I feel like I am a completely different creative director now compared to I guess this time last year before the project like really got started if you want to know more about that I recommend you watch this video up here where I talk about this biggest project of my career and then we also did a whole series documenting the process over on the kit YouTube channel I'm really proud of these videos my team did a fantastic job in creating them and they really give you a good overview of the process of uh 40 million plus now company going through a Rebrand like this but yes in all of that there's so much that I personally learned in ways that I personally grew that I wish that I'd been making content about at the time but I just couldn't and I hope that you can understand that it's true what they say though about like taking a break and giving your brain the chance to be bored is where the ideas will come from cuz I feel like while I was in New Zealand on this break I had an idea for how I want to approach my content this year I want to go back to my roots in a way I started this YouTube channel because I wanted to watch videos from designers just like living their life sharing their work like what was it like to be a professional designer in other parts of the world and other companies and that type of content didn't exist at the time this was like you know 11 years ago now I want to say wow I've been here a long time but that's why I started my channel and that's what I want to go back to is just sharing what my work life looks like now as creative director because just like back then when I was desperately searching for content from other designers right now I can't find a lot of content from folks who are in a similar position to me in a company in quite like a senior leadership role leading a design team there's just not a lot of folks sharing the day-to-day of what that's like and what they learn learning and so I thought that maybe I could be that person and that's the kind of stuff that I can share so I'm going to bring you along for a week in my work life this week and we'll see how that feels see how I feel about it see how you feel about it and we'll continue from there the only other thing I think you've missed is basically just a lot of sewing that's all I've been doing with my spare time it's very fun um but this is not a sewing Channel I promised myself that is staying just a hobby you'll see that's the cat trying to get in one sec come in buddy you probably haven't seen s for a while either but he's doing good still hates doors being closed just as much as he always has I can't remember what I was saying so um do you want to be involved in this okay I think that is you caught up on weat and now it is time for me to catch up and open Slack for the first time in 3 weeks put in your guesses now for how many notifications I'm going to ### [3:46](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JDW72mKQP0&t=226s) The first day back at work have let's I've got 62 notifications in activity and 5 DMS that is probably less than I expected so great this is what I'm going to get into first today is just getting my head back in the game of where things are at in the company where my team is at and I will build out my priorities for the day from there the only thing that I know I need to do today is review applications I'm currently hiring for a contract brow designer so my plan for the day is to go through slack respond to anything urgent put anything else in a to-do list either for today or later on this week and then um get into reviewing applications in Greenhouse done all select chadels have been cleared clear through I did not read everything but I did read the things that I was specifically tagged in and saved a bunch of stuff for later this is my like workflow for working in slack is to click that safe later button and then um that becomes like my to-do list to walk through and there is about 18 things in this list for me to go into and look at it in more detail um I feel like I can probably get through that today one thing I will say is that from going through slack I don't feel like I have a good handle on where all of our projects are at and so that would be something for me to specifically dive into and like look for information on and I've got our brand design stand up at 400 p. m. so in about um 3 and 1 half hours why did that take me so long to figure out so I know I get a good like debrief from the designers of my team on projects in that I do want to try to get caught up beforehand so uh let's see what we can do it's always like so much to come back to work after weeks off you know there's that feeling of wait how do I do my job again and I want to share something that I did before my break that I feel like it's helped a lot and I actually encouraged my whole team to do this and that was to like do our future s a favor and before the Christmas break write a list of the o hello Cat things that they needed to do in the first week back so it's kind of like we were planning our first week back at work already and that has been really helpful for myself it seems like it's the teen too the oh my God s people don't want to just see fluff the things that I wrote that I'll be doing in my first week back was reviewing contract applications and scheduling phone screens um writing a case study site section brief and honestly I was glad that I put this in the list cuz I completely forgot about that like wasn't on my mind at all and so thanks past self for reminding me of that um that's a project that the team is going to be working on later in the quarter and I need to like do the vision setting for it as creative director for like my expectations my hopes my dreams for this project um giving feedback on anything the team needs this is basically what I do every week Seb really wants to be involved here and then the last thing in my list was retreat planning cuz that is coming up not next week with the week after be all in Mexico together and we're doing a bit of a different Retreat this time we're doing something called create week which is kind of like going to be a hackathon style thing um the projects that were working on were being decided while I was out and luckily I am not the like owner of any of the projects that were working on I get to you know show off and be a participant but there's still planning that I have to do as part of that as a manager and so yes that was my list of things that my past self wrote For My Future Self I'm now about to be entering the meeting portion of my day starting with getting on a call with actually a friend's agency to talk to them about potentially fulfilling our um design contract Outsourcing whatever you want to call it needs I am realizing that if I do want to show you behind the scenes of my work a lot of it is going to look like this um I am just like not designing things so much anymore as part of my job and so I have less like fun things to show you on the screen but my hope is that seeing things like how I structure my day or like what I'm working on what I'm focusing on how I'm solving various problems that arise like the problem of remembering how to do your job after a break that this will be useful for you but you can let me know what kind of things do you want to see in these videos anyway 10 minutes before my meeting start so I'm going to quickly review some of my team's updates from while I was out this lighting is terrible now that it's the evening time but um that wraps up the first day back I spent my last hour or so going through applications we have had over 800 applications to this design contractor role um I was going through and doing the initial pass on a bunch I don't know how many you got through I feel like I barely made a dent there's still so many to review but in the initial class I'm really looking for like who actually answered the application questions and does their work look promising enough for us to want to take a deeper look um so yeah that's how I'm doing that first triage anyway um successful day back got a lot done feel like I'm actually caught up and on top of things and I wasn't expecting to feel that way um after one day back yeah there's a lot to do obviously there always is but I have my list for tomorrow I'm testing out going back to using these um what's it called I can't remember the name of this card system by UGM monk um I'll put it up on the screen instead of using a bullet Journal I'm testing out doing this cuz it kind of like sits on my desk and it's there like as a to-do list for the day for me tomorrow I really needed to get into some of that retreat planning um I need to plan our team meeting for this week so I'll share that with you and of course I'll be doing a lot more application reviewing tomorrow as well oh my gosh it is so cold today I think it's like 2° or something at least that's what I want just saying um I'll warm up soon though because I'm on my way to my hit class in the park um which is always a good way to start my day it's been H about a month maybe since I last went to one of these though so I think it's going to be quite a shock to my assistant it is 2:30 p. m. I don't know why I said p. m. I'm obviously not working at 2:30 in the morning anyway this day is one that has gotten away from me I have allowed my like time and focus to be taken up by like things I've come across in slack rather than working on my actual to-do list and so it is time to knuckle down and get those things done um not that I wasn't doing useful things this morning it's just that I guess as creative director it's really easy for your time to be sucked into lots of things that other people need or want from you and um not working on the things that you like committed to working on um either longer term or you know for yourself for things that you know need to happen so yes I'm going to get into that now I've got a couple of meeting prep things that I want to get done so that I feel in a good spot for tomorrow and then I've got some um calls later on today um actually starting at 4:00 so okay let's see how much on my to-do list I can get done in this hour and a half block well it's the end of the day um Seb is telling me that he would prefer it be dinner time it was not a super productive day I got done some things on my list the meeting preparation did happen so that's good and then I had a couple of productive like conversations with folks um so that's good I guess but yeah just didn't get to everything that I wanted to so I'm going to write my list for tomorrow moving over some of these things from here this is just a reality you know some days you don't get to everything that you wanted to and I definitely just let it continue what I talked about earlier of letting my time be taken up by things people were asking of me I will show you actually the team ### [11:37](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JDW72mKQP0&t=697s) Team rituals retro meeting plan (& results) meeting that I have planned for tomorrow um this is with the brand Studio team so I'm having us reflect on our team rituals and how they're serving us so yeah this is the goal of the meeting is to Retro the rituals we've been using to work together so far and think about what changes we want to make I'm going to have everyone rate on a scale of not at all valuable to extremely valuable how they're finding our team meetings our the way we handle metrics at the moment um and the way we handle sharing priorities we have two different like rituals that are used for that then I will have for each of these things I'll have folks claim a sticky and note like what they think is working well about it team meetings about our metrics whatever um what they don't wait what they don't feel like it's serving us have I named written that correctly what doesn't feel like it's serving us oh that could be whatever not important um what we're lacking um and then we will discuss all of these and come to some decisions together about what changes we want to make going forward I want to make sure we're never like doing something just because we've always done it I want to make sure that everything that we do as a team is because it serves us and we find it valuable and so start of the Year feels like a good time to check in on that and I will let you know how that tea meeting goes tomorrow apparently I only filmed the start and end of my day on Wednesday so the start of it was yoga class in the park with my friends and then my last meeting of the day was that brand Studio team meeting where I ran through the exercise evaluating our rituals well the update is that I think that meeting went really well folks were super engaged and I got what I needed out of it which was an understanding of how those rituals are serving us and like what I need to do about it the TL didn't attend tlda is that the team feel like our team meetings are really Val valuable the way we're tracking metrics is like somewhat valuable and then the way we're sharing priorities at the moment is verging on not valuable at all and so yes I've got some decisions that I made in the meeting to end the way we're doing the sharing priorities but I want to introduce uh another way that we should use notion to make sure that we're getting at the Spirit of why we were doing those rituals in the first place which was accountability and context on what each other is working on yes that was really valuable for me as a team meeting seems like team enjoyed it too I got some great feedback they specifically said that they um appreciate the forethought that I put into our team meetings and like that I come like with a goal and like a way we're going to reach the outcome through an activity and all of that which I love to hear because honestly planning meetings like this is one of my favorite parts of my job this is around the time of the week that I look at my overall like week to-do list and I'm like oh dear there's still a lot to get done we got 2 days tomorrow is very filled with meetings I have most of my one-on ones on a Thursday and we have um a team meeting as well there's a lot to do um and not a lot left in the week so I have my list for tomorrow ready to go and uh yeah I'll see you then happy Thursday I have decided that I'm going to take myself to a coffee shop for a little ### [14:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JDW72mKQP0&t=885s) Dealing with too many requests work session this morning get a change of scenery and I did not bring my proper camera or tripod or anything to the coffee shop and so the best clip I've got is uh this one here of my phone falling over that was a productive couple of hours in the coffee shop I'm back now um sitting at my desk what is this piece of hair doing anyway I got finished writing up this doc about criteria for what makes a project suitable to be a brand request so something that comes in like via a regular request blow and what really needs to be a project that we plan for as part of quarterly planning so we can set aside you know a significant chunk of time and resources for it we've had a few issues recently where folks have been asking us for things that we just can't help them with because it requires more time than we have available to like handle requests are really meant to be for those like quicker um simpler low lift type projects um and so I hope that this do is going to help folks understand that and like make decisions about whether they can submit something or it should come through project quarterly planning if any other creative directors or like folks who lead or even just work on brand Studio teams are watching I'm sure you know the feeling of like there always being way more work than you have capacity to do and I think one of the ways that I can work on solving this as creative director is honestly just partnering better and more with the leaders of other teams so that they are making sure that their teams aren't planning like too many projects that we can't support anyway this is a really important thing that ties into my goals for the year which I can't remember if I talked about but around um fostering more creativity on our team and like just generally making it a more creative work environment doing more iterations and learning from projects that sort of thing that can only happen when you have the like brain space for it so yes that's what I'm thinking about um now that I'm back at my desk that's right the exercise that I did yesterday in the team meeting of like rating how valuable our team rituals are I'm going to do that individually today in one-on ones ### [16:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JDW72mKQP0&t=1005s) Improving 1 on 1s um I want to send some messages right now just to give folks a heads up that I'm going to be asking that so they can think about like where they would rate a one-onone on a scale um because each one and one you know is kind of different with each person and so I think this is important to speak about more on an individual level I find that folks on my team are often like saving things up to talk about in one of on whether to inform me on something to ask me a question and I just want them to feel like they can do that at any time and so that is also the environment I'm kind of trying to Foster this year which I'm doing through things like sending more looms and voice notes um just to like get that Vibe of talking to each other and working together even if we're not literally on a call cuz the reality is I can't have a call with every single one of my team members each day as much as that'll be fun so yes I'm going to give that heads up now and do some more prep for those one-on ones and then I'm going to write a brief for a new section of our site this is in part of my work as creative director is like that Vision setting I have a vision for how I think case studies should be presented on our site in a way that makes it really interactive and useful for any creators looking at it but also that makes it really useful as a resource for our team when we're trying to find specific examples of creat a success with a certain feature or you know in a certain Niche that sort of thing and so I'm going to write that up now so that I can hand it off to the team and they can like take that and run with it hi Jackie our last meeting of the day today was an all team meeting where we were going over the like plan agenda whatever for our team Retreat that's coming up we're going to be going to Mexico we're staying at this amazing Resort um we've been there once before and so I'm really excited to go back but yes The Vibes were high on that call um and that is probably what the next video will be I think will'll be a recap of that Retreat anyway um got a lot done today had good conversations with my 101s most folks said were in the like higher rating of the value that they see in our meetings and the main common feedback about what can be improved is focusing more on longer term career growth type stuff it's really easy for one mon to be filled up with the like oh challenges we're facing right now the stuff that we need to be doing in the next week or the next month or whatever and not look further out and that's something that I want to be more intentional about making sure we do and so yeah that's something for me to work on anyway tomorrow Friday meeting free day except I actually think I do have a couple of meetings yeah I've got one one1 and um an interview but no like recurring meetings happen on a Friday I need to really knuckle down and write a campaign Manifesto for the launch of our app store that's coming up this is something that I'm a Blocker on I need to get it done so that my like creative Direction vision is set for the campaign and everyone else can go ahead and like write the copy decide what merch activation we're going to do and that sort of thing so that is my job for tomorrow it is a very gloomy rainy day ### [19:52](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JDW72mKQP0&t=1192s) TGIF today here in Spain I have a short to-do list today just three things that I need to get done two meetings that interview one1 so let's make it happen um I got a bit of an earlier start than usual because um I'm taking a break in about 20 minutes to go and get my nails done um and get some lunch but I've finished my like General slack catch up and feel like I've gotten everyone everything that they need from me and so when I get back from my h r and from lunch I can dive head first into this campaign manifestor writing place your guesses now in the comments for what color I'm going to get today oh my gosh it's so cold today anyway um now I'm going to go eat sandwiches for lunch so if anyone watching this happens to live in Lexia or maybe if you're going to come visit I'm going to show you where to get my favorite bckad so this sandwich shop is inside the rusafa market and it is called aneta Deli and seriously the sandwiches are so good they have a bunch of like regular ones on the menu and then they also do a special and yep I've enjoyed every single one that I've ever gotten just had a super productive writing session got what I needed to done and I'm really proud of it I've sent it on to Francis our product marketing manager to get her feedback next so now I head home to tackle the other two things on my to-do list and get into my meetings okay I'm calling it that my friends is a wrap on the week um despite only having oh wait what's my camera doing despite only having three things on my to-do list for today didn't get to the last one didn't get to review any more of those design applications but I do feel really good about moving ahead with the two agencies that I spoke to this week to see about them potentially taking on our Outsourcing work so um yes that's where we're at with that project talked about a bunch in this video I hope you've enjoyed just like coming along with me for a work week I would love your feedback if this is a type of video that you would like to see me do again um and what you would want to see different or added or whatever next time but I hope you enjoyed hanging out with me from your spot on my desk next week like I said I'm off to Mexico for our team Retreat so I'll probably see you in a recap video of that if I get around to making it real talk Care at the end it's been really nice to feel the energy to ### [22:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JDW72mKQP0&t=1335s) Real talk Vlog again and to have actually kept it up and vlogged each day and to have felt good about that to have wanted to do that so yeah thanks for bearing with me as I've been working through burnout and uh videos are going to continue to be spor but hopefully good because when I do create them it's because I'm really feeling a lot of energy oops the memory card got full which means that I filmed a lot this week and I've got a lot to edit so I'll end it there thank you for watching I appreciate you all and if you haven't seen it yet you should go check out this video I made about our Rebrand the biggest project of my career so far it was sort of like a fun Story Time Style video with me talking through it and also Clips this is kind of how I'm thinking about doing the retreat video so go watch that let me know if you like it and maybe I'll have another one kind of like that coming your way very soon --- *Источник: https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/17741*