Say Hello to Tiffany Rogers, Senior Marketing Designer

What do you do?

I’m a Senior Marketing Designer with the Instacart Brand Team. I’m currently working on a large-scale In-Store Marketing signage project.

How did you get into design?

I was a Fine Arts student who wanted to be employed when I finished school. I decided to get a Design concentration as a safe bet, not knowing how much I would end up loving it.

What makes everything worth it?

I get to mix creativity and logic in a really interesting way. Every day there are new challenges and problems for me to solve, and I try to make those solutions impactful and beautiful.

What’s the greatest piece of career advice you’ve ever received?

Done is better than perfect. As a perfectionist, one of my bad habits is letting a project languish while I think of the ideal solution. The reality of working in design (particularly in a fast-moving space like marketing design) is that it’s constantly changing and evolving. There’s never a perfect solution, so I’ve really had to learn how to say something is enough and release it.

What advice would you give to a designer just starting out?

I didn’t realize how important a creative network was, until late in the game. It’s not enough to be a solid designer, you need people to connect you to opportunities, otherwise, you’ve just got a great portfolio that no one is looking at.

Where do you find inspiration?

I hate to say Instagram…but Instagram. Being in a competitive ad space means researching the market and our competitors. I spend a lot of time looking at ads across social platforms, in public spaces, and just being observant of what’s presented in my daily experience. And there are always great websites like Behance and Dribbble to get inspired by as well!

Working on various projects at Instacart, which one was the most challenging and exciting for you?

Shortly after I joined Instacart, we took over all of the ad space in the Embarcadero BART station in downtown San Francisco. Coming from a largely digital background (mostly illustration and more lightweight files) to a huge print project was insane. I must have scoured every image at least 20 times to make sure they were perfect! It was a really great exercise in breaking out of my comfort zone, and the project gave me my first experience of being on set at large production photoshoots, working with models, and working with large quantities of print specs.

Where did you grow up and what made it special?

I grew up in Madison, Wisconsin. It’s a small but mighty city with a vibrant and diverse community and it’s home to one of the top universities in the Midwest. There were a lot of opportunities to immerse myself in higher learning, arts and culture.

What was the first thing you ever designed?

There was a pre-req course at my university called Letterform, which we had to complete before continuing on to any formal design training. It was a hybrid course where we learned the history/foundations of typography and then had to painstakingly recreate well-known typefaces by hand. I can still remember sweating over my first (and second and third) attempt at drawing a word in Caslon! I don’t recall what the word was anymore, but I so clearly remember the labor and the hyper-attention to detail — it was a great segway into my designer life.

What is something you’re most proud of in your life/career?

Being able to bring a diverse perspective to the corporate marketing arena. Representation (and not just for show or to be on-trend) is an important part of my value system as a designer and as a human. It’s important that we’re inclusive in our imagery and language, and I’m really proud to have a place helping Instacart’s marketing reflect our world.

What is something that your team does differently than other design teams?

We shoot a lot of our images in-house! One of the things that drew me to Instacart was the studio, and the chance to sharpen my photography and styling skills. Our team is really hands-on with creative, plus I no longer have to scour the internet for the perfect stock photo — I can just take it myself!

Come build with Tiffany.

If you’re excited about defining the future of a one trillion dollar industry, building an ad-serving network for groceries, scaling the world’s most extensive grocery catalog, perfecting a real-time on-demand logistics chain, all while simultaneously designing the future of food for millions of people, you should take a look at the available opportunities or reach out to someone from the team.

Instacart

Author

Instacart is the leading grocery technology company in North America, partnering with more than 1,400 national, regional, and local retail banners to deliver from more than 80,000 stores across more than 14,000 cities in North America. To read more Instacart posts, you can browse the company blog or search by keyword using the search bar at the top of the page.