A peek into the Money Studio team with marketing designer Daina Lightfoot
Meet the crafters behind Shopify UX
With a team of 750 UXers, there’s a lot of variation in the types of projects you can work on at Shopify. We speak with designers, creatives, and researchers about what they’re working on, what inspires them, and lessons they’ve learned. First up, meet staff marketing designer, Daina Lightfoot.
Daina is a designer, creative director, leader, and offline creative. Throughout her career, the one consistent has been her passion for creating impactful interactions between people and products through seamless brand and product experiences.
She is a staff marketing designer on the Money Studio team, a highly collaborative group of content designers, front-end developers, and marketing designers that focuses on the branding and marketing for Shopify’s robust suite of financial products.
Before Shopify, she was leading the brand design team at Abstract as the Creative Director, who’s team of designers and front-end developers were responsible for all of Abstract’s brand and marketing touchpoints from in-product visual systems, to immersive in-person experiences at Adobe MAX.
What project are you working on right now?
I’m working on a go-to-market campaign for our blockchain offerings, which are in beta right now — but are leading into early access. When I say go-to-market campaign, that usually contains a landing page, branded moments within the product, emails, performance ads (paid ads or social), organic social, and sometimes video or out of home marketing like billboards, wheatpaste posters, and merch.
Tell us about the cross-functional team working on this project.
I’m working with folks from all different types of departments within the larger blockchain team. That includes the director of product, product designers, content designers, merchant success managers, and PMMS (product marketing managers).
Since we are creating a video for this project, we also collaborated with folks from our production team. They have a team of producers who help navigate working with agencies and video creative that requires a bit more production effort.
On the Money Studio team, we have content designers, who are strategists and writers, that help with all of the go-to-market assets. We also have marketing front end developers that build out our pages on shopify.com and some of the marketing experiences within the product.
Tell us about the last project you launched and the biggest lesson you learned.
Our team just launched Shopify Protect, which is free fraud protection for Shopify merchants that use Shop Pay. We built a landing page, a video, assets for a blog post, organic social, and ads.
Shopify Protect covers the total order cost and chargeback fee and handles the dispute process on protected fraud-based chargebacks. For example, if someone uses a fraudulent credit card to purchase something, Shopify will reimburse the merchant for that merchandise if they’ve already shipped it.
This project had a pretty small team, but was highly collaborative between our content designer, product marketing manager, and agency partner, Good Secrets.
A lesson I was reminded of on this project is to trust your gut and stick to your guns if you’ve got a solid concept that might be a little outside stakeholders comfort zone. It is easy to say yes to everyone’s feedback, but it takes a lot of practice to be able to push back and stand up for your ideas.
How do you start a new project?
It really depends on the size of the project. Most often at the start of a project, my team will get briefed by product marketing and those briefs are usually pretty light when it comes to deliverables. The expectation is that our team provides solutions to marketing’s problems. Marketing has to first scope out the problem they’re trying to solve and who they’re solving it for. From there, we usually go into a brainstorming creative canvas kickoff, where we think about who the stakeholders are and what kind of brand attributes might fall into this product that we’re marketing.
This isn’t the case for all projects, but this is a typical workflow for most go-to-market campaigns. From there, usually the designer and the content designer kind of jam together and work on creative concepts for how they think that they should solve the problem. Then we present it back to marketing.
When we’re just starting out the creative process, it’s important to try to figure out the messaging or tagline alongside any of the creative visuals. When the visuals pair back with that headline, the message is always stronger and easy to digest.
We also spend time seeing where a product fits within our ecosystem, seeing where Shopify is different compared to other products in the market, and if there are other products in the market that are relevant.
What’s a project you’re really excited about that another team is working on and why?
The Retail team is working on some really interesting things. They’re collaborating with Apple on a payment feature for Shopify POS that allows you to tap a card on an iPhone rather than plug something into your phone or connect with a card reader.
There’s so much room to grow in that space and when you’re working on hardware, there are some really interesting problems to solve — especially in a world where we’re starting to shop in person again. We get to ask ourselves “What have we learned over the last few years and what could be implemented?”
Shopify bursts are IRL events where Shopifolk come together to do deep diving, problem solving, aligning, and shipping. Tell us about your experience bursting.
I’ve been on three bursts, two were in Lisbon, Portugal, and one was to Blue Mountain in Ontario. The first one in Lisbon was with a small group of only four people and it was very much hands-on working the entire time for five days. The one in Blue Mountain was for three days and was much more focused on meeting as a group of leaders in a product group.
I am looking forward to a future where there’s like almost a mix of both or it’s a smaller group of collaborators who are meeting. While we did some project work on both of these bursts, the biggest thing I got out of them was the one-on-one relationship building in real life. It’s good to have the time to work together in person on a project kickoff or concepts review, but the most important part of Burst’s for me is fostering personal connections.
What’s the best advice you’ve ever been given?
My mom is very much a believer that the energy that you put into the world is the energy that you’re going to get back. That’s something that I’ve always believed in and allows me to usually put an optimistic spin on most things.
There is also a tip that you give new snowboarders which is “look there, go there”. Always keep your eyes and mind on where you want to go and that’s where you’ll go.
How do you explain what you do and work on to your family?
I’m the only “computer” person in my family. I mostly just say that I work on websites and printed things or I talk about general graphic design, something like “that image that’s on your shirt, that’s something I would make”. I honestly don’t think that they have really any clue as to what I’m doing and have kind of given up on trying to understand.
Tell us two truths and a lie.
I can squat 300 pounds.
I speak three languages.
I’ve lost count of the number of tattoos I have.
Tell us something you’ve never told anyone before.
This is a secret that maybe my husband Austin knows, but other people don’t know… I’m obsessive about not having a messy house. If it’s messy I can’t focus and it gives me stress and anxiety.
What’s on your to-do list today?
It’s a mix of meetings, leadership stuff, and IC work.
- Sign a merchant for our blockchain video and finalize storyboards
- Token-gated commerce wireframes
- One-on-ones with my two direct reports
- A meeting about how we conduct interview for marketing designers
What’s the last slack message you sent?
“I have a Dropbox folder of personal fonts that I usually download on my machine, but since we aren’t supposed to have personal stuff, I haven’t installed them.”
~just designer things~
What tools do you have open on your desktop and what are you using them for?
I have…
Slack
Spotify
Chrome
Asana
Google docs
Photoshop — I was cutting out some images
Illustrator — I was breaking apart a vector drawing I did a while ago
Figma — I was working on the storyboards for that video and working on a landing page
Fellow app — We use this for our meeting notes
That’s it.
How many tabs do you have open?
I think 18 in one window and 5 in the other. Not too bad.
Most used Figma shortcuts.
I guess copy and paste styles? Just your standard ⌥⌘C and ⌥⌘V, which copies a style of something from Figma. Honestly, I have not learned that many hotkeys in Figma because I use Illustrator a lot and then they just aren’t the same and it annoys me.
Favorite program, least favorite.
Figma and Illustrator are my go-tos. My least favorite is Smart Recruiter — although they recently did do a UI update recently that makes it slightly less miserable. Actually, no, there’s another one that we use for invoicing called Coupa and I’ve never seen anything that un-user friendly.
What book has had the biggest influence on your career?
Harry Potter. I don’t know about my career, but I feel like it’s impacted my entire life. I feel like we should do a poll of how many designers at Shopify have a Harry Potter tattoo — because I know of at least three.
Favorite merchant and why?
That’s a nearly impossible question. I feel like so many of my favorite brands use Shopify. Volcom, a brand I have loved since I was a kid, is a Shopify merchant which is pretty surreal.
I also have a friend who started Surf Gems, and she is making earrings with upcycled surfboard glassing waste. The scrap material is transformed into lightweight delicate super unique jewelry.
The best company that I’ve discovered since working at Shopify? I would say Skims, which is funny that I’ve discovered it from working here, but I literally did. I don’t follow the Kardashians at all, but they make great underwear!
Follow Daina on Twitter and visit her website. If these projects and challenges sound interesting to you, check out our open roles on the Shopify UX team.
