For one, BuzzFeed is a media company, virgin territory for a designer who has worked mostly in e-shopping. There, he helped unify the company’s different products under a single cohesive vision.īut BuzzFeed represents an entirely new challenge for Watkins. From there, he spent time at Zoosk and Formspring as lead designer, and at Amazon as UX designer, before becoming Etsy’s senior product design manager, growing a ragtag group of nine designers, each working more or less separately, into a team of 27. A creative writing major in college, Watkins stumbled into the tech startup scene in 2007, helping two of his friends launch PMOG, a Firefox extension that turned web browsing into a role-playing game. Watkins fell into the design field accidentally. It’s when everyone at a company is thinking about design-the writers, the engineers, even the people selling the ads-not just the designers.” “These days, it’s popular for companies to say they ‘want’ design, but that’s not what it is. “Design should be something that permeates a company,” he tells me. But we also think it’s important to not be overly precious about it.” Watkins agrees. “We believe design is something that informs every decision.
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“We have a lot of compatible ideals about design,” says Johanesen. And BuzzFeed thinks it has found that someone in Watkins. In 2015 alone, BuzzFeed will be releasing at least two dedicated apps for news and video, as well as new properties, like BFF, which will create BuzzFeed content specifically for social media platforms like Instagram and Snapchat.īuzzFeed already has a team of talented designers working for it, but what it needs is someone to unite them, and the projects they are working on, under a unified design umbrella, while advocating design through the rest of the company.
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“Even mobile wasn’t really a thing yet.” But what started originally as a small, Chinatown-based viral lab studying how things get shared on the Internet has grown into a global media company with over 200 million visitors a month and over a dozen different irons in the fire. “When BuzzFeed first started out in 2007, everything was on the web,” says Chris Johanesen, vice president of product and the company’s fourth employee. Design should be something that permeates a company.