a thought process by Guilherme Sarmento
đź•’ review
change review timeMy task as a designer is to get me from being a stranger to being a remarkable candidate for a position at a company that probably gets lots of applicants. Where should I start? Maybe I should start with them... The reviewers.
Hey there! How much time do you have to review this application?
who am i? am i a designer? am i a front-end dev? guess it depends who asks lol. probably should just introduce myself as this weird generalist that is not a rock start in anything...
I'm a 30-year-old Brazilian guy that lives in Rio de Janeiro. I'm a designer, front-end developer, ex-woodworker, a wannabe surfer and if I may be honest, despite having done all of these things on and off for over a decade, I'm not the world's best in any of them (not even close). And that's exactly the point.
You see... I have a degree in industrial design and all that, but this is not what made me a good designer. As a problem solver, the more things you've been exposed to, the bigger the chance you have of finding among them something useful for new problems life throws at you. I believe that good designers are generalists. And throughout my life, I've had this weird, but useful, habit of spending countless hours, days, and months doing countless dives into various subjects. That's what made me a good designer.
Why Memberful? how do i show that i align with their values? should probably talk about the way they work and things i like about it, maybe mention other companies that i like and ways that i work or tried to work in the places i've been at
One of these learning dives was about work itself. How to work. How to structure and evaluate a team. How to manage time. All those things. The first company and way of working that stood out to me was Valve.
This was five years ago. I had co-started a group of creative people (around 30 or 40 people) that shared knowledge and did a variety of different creative projects together. During this whole experience, we tested some of Valve's ideas like flat team structures, circumstantial leadership, and peer evaluations to calculate pay for each work we did.
A borderless work and life was another concept that always resonated with me. I found out about Buffer, Basecamp, Memberful and other companies that managed to find a way of creating great products, but not at the cost of its employees lifes. Since then, I've always kept an eye on what they were doing, but had never put much effort into applying due to my lack of remote work experience, but also, what can only be described as, an impostor syndrome. Fortunately, this has changed in these past 2 years, since pretty much all work I did was remote whilst putting a lot of effort in working out my self esteem.
how do i think as a person and why i think this position is a good fit with my beliefs? how to talk a bit more about myself as a person? should talk about the action - curiosity - infinity theory.
This random creative process of mine has led me to my own theories and belief systems. One of the most fundamental ideas I've built in me is that being a human is trying to balance action and curiosity. I believe that by doing this, you increase the chance of finding yourself at that metaphysical ”I'm alive and life is worth it” place. I call it ”feeling infinity” and it usually lasts only a split second, some minutes if you're lucky. And then, back you go into your curiosity stream to search for another moment like that.
So, now, whenever I find out about openings in compaies I really like, my curiosity tends to through the roof. I cannot shake from my head the curiosity of working in places that seem so aligned with. That's why I am applying. I would love to put shape into this somewhat loose image I have of what working at Memberful may be.
how should I apply? build something? what if the application was a project itself? i could try to show how i thought about the problem that is applying for a job. How to show different layers of my thought? Could i make it a choice based on time? Hide/Show what the reviewer can see?
I decided to think about this application as a design problem. You, the reviewer, know better than me that you have far too many applications to review. Most of them are probably great candidates.
You are my user. I'm thinking about your experience. What would you want to know about me? What do you want to know about my work? How much time you have? And to avoid not having an end goal in mind I decided that a rainy weekend was more than enough time to get this from zero to done. This means that some of my ideas did not make it. Don't mistake that time budget for lack of interest though, a good design process always needs boundaries.
how to show my work and previous works/jobs i've done and had? are photos necessary? is it possible to make it about curiosity? can i emphasize a link and make another one seem less relevant?
Instead of an end product, this application is supposed to be a dive into my thought process. It showcases a bunch of the things I've learned in almost a decade working with the web. But, of course, this might not be enough to get a better sense of what I can do, so here are some links to the works I've done in the past. And to be clear, I was heavily involved in designing (from Illustrator to Sketch and then Figma) and/or coding (from Craft CMS, to Rails, Shopify and Node.js) all of them.
This project was designed in Figma, coded in VS Code, pushed to Github and then deployed with Netlify. To learn more about my career up until this point you can always download my resume or visit my LinkedIn .