Inside Marketing Design at Sketch

Welcome back to Inside Marketing Design. I'm your host, Charli Marie, and this is a show where we get to just like nerd out about brand and marketing design and tech. Each episode features a different tech company and we dig into their marketing design processes and projects. And this week I'm speaking with not one, but two folks from Sketch. Now I'm sure you know Sketch, it was one of the first design tools truly built for the digital design process. And today you'll get to hear from Sketch CMO Carly Marsh, who's been at the company for about two and a half years, and you'll also hear from Digital Designer Osvaldas Poviliunas, who joined about a year ago. And before you ask, yes, in this episode we absolutely do talk about the fact that their biggest competitor Figma has just been acquired by Adobe. In fact, you'll actually get to hear about how the Sketch team approaches the design of a competitor comparison page on this site. And we also talk about the design process for feature pages too. 

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Before we get into that, though, I wanna say a big thanks to Webflow for sponsoring this season of the show. Webflow is a no-code website building tool that lets you bring your designs to life through an interface that we can all feel very familiar with as designers, as opposed to like typing code by hand. When you use Webflow, it feels like you're using a design tool. You have all your layers on the left, all the styling options on the right. But the key difference between using Webflow or using like just a design tool is that when you are adding shapes or making styling changes in Webflow, it's writing the code for you in the background. It's very cool and if you're on a small marketing design team in particular, Webflow could be an incredible resource for you to speed up the design and development process, as well as give you more control as a designer. So check it out at insidemarketingdesign.com/webflow 

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But now let's get into the episode and take a look inside marketing design at Sketch. Welcome to the show Carly and Oz, super excited to have you here and be digging in on Sketch because I don't know, Sketch feels like it's at the start of a resurgence right now, which is pretty exciting. So I feel like this is great timing for this episode. Let's start by talking about what you're each responsible for. So Carly, we'll start with you. As CMO, what are your responsibilities at Sketch?

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Carly:- Thanks Charli. I just wanna echo that we're really excited to be here today and talk about Sketch. So yes, CMO here at Sketch. I've been here for just over two and a half years. It's quite a broad remit in terms of what I do and my team looks after. But I suppose in a nutshell, we would say anything concerning with the website, external comms, that could be to new audiences or existing audiences when we are thinking about our customers, social community, and then alongside that, what we do in terms of sort of maintaining the brand as well. So it's sort of everything in between and included in those categories. So it's quite a wide remit, but it's a really exciting one at the same time.

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Charli:- Totally. And we'll get into in a second all of the different people that are working on those things and like how the team is structured as well. But Oz, what about you? As Digital Designer how would you describe what you're responsible for?

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Oz:- Hello. I am a Digital Designer at Sketch, responsible for marketing websites, yeah, any kind of design requests, any design from small tasks to bigger, you know, campaign pages. Yes, small banners, could be anything.

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Charli:- All of things. And how many Digital Designers do we have on the marketing side of things at Sketch?

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Oz:- So we do have three designers in our team or four designers. Yeah.

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Carly:- We've got one that's a bit of a hybrid.

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Oz:- Yeah.

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Carly:- So they're a special entity in terms of designer and developer, which is very rare.

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Charli:- I've had that described on previous, like previous episodes cause that's been a role in other teams. That's a full-stack designer. So they're designing, but then they're also building as well. So four designers. That seems like not very many considering, you know, the size of Sketch as a product, and what it's doing for the community. How about on the product side? Like what's the ratio do you think of marketing designers versus product designers?

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Carly:- It's hard to say in terms of a ratio with specific numbers, but there's definitely a higher proportion of designers that are involved in product design and the way that there's sort of many elements to the design team when we think about it from a Sketch perspective. So we've got the team then that Oz sits within, within my marketing function that look predominantly after the website and everything digital. Then we've got the product design team that obviously work close with the product, the interface and developing on Sketches we know both in the Mac and the web app. And then we've got design operations who are responsible for looking after our, sort of our brand, our guidelines, our design systems, our libraries, making sure we've got that consistency. And then we've got content design as well, which work closely with marketing, so they're responsible for creating perhaps the content and the assets that we need, that we would take out and push out to market through the activities that we're engaged in. So slightly different to what Oz is doing. So him and the team will look after everything sort of digital associated with the website. But the content design team, everything sort of asset wise, which could be an eBook to a show reel, a short animated film.

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Charli:- Oh really wide range of stuff. Yeah.

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Carly:- Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there's definitely a lot more then if we sort of combine those three functions outside of marketing to create like a design team. We're looking in the region of about 20 designers, that are included within that makeup. So marketing website is a little bit of the minority, but it's really nice in the way that the team is structured here at Sketch, in the fact that everybody works together, they have collaborative sessions, where they can inspire each other and bounce ideas off and in that sort of way, I'm sure Oz can elaborate, but yeah, marketing function is a small part of a bigger design machine.

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Charli:- That is usually how it ends up being, isn't it?

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Oz:- The content design is an extension in the way of our marketing team. So you know, if they need any assets, we try to do some ourselves or we try to kind of collaborate closely, give ideas as well in terms of what we need, and yeah, kind of work closely with some content and product design sometimes as well.

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Charli:- I like that you have that set up because I find that, I don't know, I'm biased in saying this, cause web design is my passion and it's what I love the most and I find that the other stuff that I need to work on, as a marketing designer, tends to be like, I don't know, like the middle child in a way. It's a little bit forgotten, it's a little bit brushed over. I don't focus on it as much as the web stuff. So having a separate team who owns that, like that's what they do, gives it the attention, honestly, that stuff deserves. I like that set up a lot. Makes a lot of sense. You reference, Carly, like a wider design team, but am I right in thinking that Oz, you actually sit within the marketing team? Or do you report into like a design manager?

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Oz:- Marketing team. Yeah, we've got our own set up, little set up within the marketing team, you know, our web leads and then yeah, we kind of report to the marketing managers and...

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Charli:- Nice. Tell me more about the makeup of the marketing team that you lead Carly.

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Carly:- Yeah. Do you know, I realize I missed off like content, they're gonna kill me when they hear this podcast and be like, well what about me? What about us? So they're product marketing, and it's testament to how big that remit is when it comes to marketing. But the way we are structured is that to support that sort of breadth and depths of what we need to do, we are set up by sort of function, which is, you know, I would say the traditional approach when it comes to marketing. There's different ways you can create a team or structure your team, but I've decided to structure them by sort of discipline and expertise. So I've got a content team, product marketing team, website team, social team, PR and community team. And then we all collaborate on cross-functional projects, and initiatives, as well as work on their own initiatives that perhaps don't involve so many of the other members of the team. That works really well in the way that we can sort of plug and play specific disciplines, specific people into specific projects. And nothing is too much sort of, I suppose cut and dry, based on what we need to do from either campaigns that we are planning or reactionary work, like what we've just gone through a little spate of right now, it works for us. But I realize and recognize based on my experience as well, that that's not the only way to structure the marketing team. But for us here at Sketch, that works really, really well and we find that it actually brings out the best of individuals and sub-teams by structuring by, yeah, discipline or skill, however you wanna say it.

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Charli:- And Oz, how do you find it being part of the marketing team? I'm assuming you are part of the website sub-team that Carly was mentioning just then. How do you find that compared to being part of the design team? Do you find you still get a lot of connection with the other designers and like get that design feedback across the design org in a way?

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Oz:- Oh yeah, we do. I think, yeah, although we are part of the website team, but we do, you know, we can collaborate with other designers, we've got dedicated Slack channels, you know, where we share ideas, where we share research, or you have like a review channel where we can kind of talk about the work. So yeah, anything we wanna kind of share, we can start a conversation with a wider audience, wider designer audience. We don't really feel that separated really. Everything is one big family.

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Charli:- That's good. And I'm sure we'll get into talking about the specifics of like that review process and getting feedback as we talk about some of your projects later on. But let's talk about the Sketch brand for a minute cause you mentioned that Carly is something that you're kind of responsible for, as CMO is evolving that keeping it going forward, and I'm sure you too Oz, and implementing it on the website. How would you describe the Sketch brand?

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Carly:- I think I would describe the brand as sort of friendly, authoritative. I like to think about it when people ask me about those sort of questions currently and in my past is like, how do you describe Sketch as a person if you were gonna go meet them for a cup of coffee, or meet them in a bar for a drink. And I think yeah, like friendly or authoritative, quite open and inclusive as well. We sort of don't distinguish or assume anything in terms of what we do. But then I think we've also got elements of sort of polish refinement and probably one of the biggest element is sort of craftsmanship and attention to detail. We pride ourselves on that. And that's something again, that when I think about brand, I think about, you know, how we externalize that from, you know, the things we do, the things we, you know, say and the ways we behave. And when I think about those sort of descriptors I've just, just sort of shared, I feel like those are the things that come through, and in terms of, you know, how we mobilize everything from our product through to our marketing efforts, and it's really interesting because actually as individuals within the company, our employees have a lot of those same values as well. So it's great because you're not artificially creating, you know, a brand that is not built on anything. It's like we live and breathe and they sit nicely with our values, so it's easy to bring those to life. When it comes to sort of more application, you know, we've got things like our brand voice that's written down and noted and we educate and train people on that internally, not just writers, but again the wider company, so they really understand how we apply that. And then as part of the design operations, we've got Chief Design Officer Marcelo, who is responsible for setting that brand vision in terms of very much the look and feel. And I don't know anybody who's listening along who's watched Sketch journey would've noticed sort of a key change in terms of visual direction last year. And we now, as a marketing team, are sort of evolving that and applying that to what we do. But he's sort of like the custodian and the guardian of that sort of execution that we then follow and make sure that, you know, it's consistently implied in what we do, because that's the make of us a brand. We have to be consistent, we can't just switch things on and off.

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Charli:- Yeah, yeah. Everything has to be like telling the same story, right? To build a brand. What does this mean for you Oz? Like when you are designing a new page for the website, for example, how do you ensure that you're keeping consistent with what's happening in the product, what's happening with the content designers, and like all of the different applications of the brand?

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Oz:- I think it's, well we do have a brand look and feel, you do have some rules that we kind of go with, you know.

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Charli:- But I'm assuming you're not referencing that each time, right? You're not like looking up the rules before you go and design a project?

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Oz:- No, we kind of have like, you know, the general look and feel I guess, and then we try to evolve it each time. Again, collaborate with broader designers, see if there's anything new sort of their end. We try to adapt also get direction from the content design team. So yeah, I think it's a big collaborative project.

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Carly:- I think it's fair to say as well, Oz, it hasn't been sort of perhaps easy in some instances when we do look back to that that visual language changeover that happened in May time last year, that was very much developed with a product design mentality, like what the product should evolve and look like. And then we then have the job then of taking those guidelines and then applying them to what we do because we ultimately wanna get into a place where there's no sort of difference between the product and the website. It should be one, it should be seamless, but it doesn't work in that clear cut way. You know, we need to stress test a few things and see how a specific, you know, language or aesthetic might work. So I think, you know, Oz as well as the rest of the wider team have been working continuously and that's still work in progress at the moment, to apply what is the correct visual language, but again, have some variance so that there's some, you know, variety, but in a consistent way in terms of the website. But also now we're in a space where that visual language has been around for a little while, so we wanna push it on a little bit and see how far we can take it, which is a really nice, you know, exercise. I'm not involved in that, I'm not a designer, I don't profess to be, but I see the good work that the team are doing and there's new stuff coming through all the time, when I think about the website and the iterative releases that we're making, which assessment to the team and the quality of, you know, their design expertise that we're able to do that, we've got flexibility in that language to push it on, which is what we need.

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Oz:- Also reacting I guess to the market itself to, you know, to any new trends that might come up. So yeah, it's a constantly evolving process.

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Charli:- Oh, I like that you mentioned that because I mean, often we say when you're like working on a brand, you want it to be timeless, you don't wanna follow trends, but you have a really interesting audience, your audience is fellow designers, and so you wanna be current, you wanna be seen to be like, no, we're on top of things, we're up to the minute, we're like the latest tool that you can be using. And so I'm assuming that you can use trends sometimes to your strength there to like lean into them.

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Oz:- Yeah, I mean it's kind of, it's balancing out the trends sometimes, you know, trying to come up with anything new, for example, and trying to balance what's out there and trying try to lead as well. Trying to be the-

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Charli:- Yeah, good point.

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Oz:- Try to set the trends sometimes.

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Charli:- I like it, I like it. Yeah. Be the trends setter, not the trend follower.

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Oz:- Yeah.

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Carly:- I don't know if you've seen Charli, but on some of the pages we've launched recently, this isn't a plug by the way, but we've launched a, you know, an education offer now, which is finally free, and that's great for new people who wanna try Sketch.

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Charli:- Woo. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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Carly:- The web team took the opportunity there to introduce sort of handwritten typeface, which we'd never done before with Sketch. Like we haven't done an exploratory work and that was the first sort of live application of sort of pushing it a bit further and trying to be sort of a bit more pushing that friendly element of our brand value and bringing that to life and it was received so well that now we've applied it and rolled it out to other pages. So I think that's again testament to like a bit of test and learn and try things that aren't too sort of in the moment and then they're gone again, but gives us a little bit more freedom and flexibility.

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Oz:- It's kind of adding the little details, the little kind of, yeah, friendly bits like Carly was saying, trying to be more marketing-friendly, as opposed to being very product-driven.

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Charli:- Well speaking of products you mentioned that you are wanting to break down like the differences between product and the website, that it should feel seamless and feel like one. And something that definitely stood out to me, because I've used Sketch is that some of the details on the prototyping page, for example, you're bringing in product UI as little visual accents on the page, which I think is a very cool use of yeah, a product feature, some product UI to bring it as part of the marketing side, to tell a story to create the visual language there. Tell us more about that Oz, the design of this prototyping page. How did you decide to take that approach with it to bring in parts of the product to the page?

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Oz:- Yeah, I think it kind of start from the beginning, how we kind of started creating the pages in general. Yeah, when I started a year ago, we kind of had a design system which was very kind of web app, or Mac app driven. So it was very problem driven. We kind of started using that as a basis, but we evolved it into more of a kind of, you know, more friendlier marketing-led approach, and started adding all these little details. So yeah, I think that was kind of thinking just, you know, start with the basis what we have, even if it kind of maybe trying to look similar to our web app and then kind of just build on it, add these little details, this little nuggets, and the handoff page then kind of evolved into, yeah, we try using the little details from develop the handoff tool, how that actually works in real life and adapted those on our page to kind of give the customer that kind of feel that, you know, instantly kind of get the feel how the app works basically.

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Charli:- Yeah, which is definitely the what you want a marketing site to do, right?

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Oz:- Yeah.

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Charli:- Someone needs to get a feel for the product.

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Oz:- Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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Carly:- Yeah. And I think, you know, a part of that as well, Charli, like even with a product that has a 30-day trial, with no barriers, no credit card, no like tie-in or buy-in or anything sort of sinister that's going on, there's still that sort of barrier to try, that barrier to entry, like that fear that people might have that they might be like, you know, tied into something. So the more that we can take what happens in product and put that in our website so people can experience it before they even, you know, download the Mac app, or use the web app or have to go through any of those complexities, like just so simple, the signup process. But anything we can do to make that, you know, bridge that gap is only a good thing and that's what we should be doing as marketing as well. We should be making that more accessible and more available, so that kick started a really big sort of change, and that's something that we wanna evolve and do more and more of, experience the product in the website is our sort of number one ambition and driver behind how we want the site to evolve.

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Charli:- So the marketing team owns the website, right? Owns the marketing website. And when we talked before we recorded, you said something interesting that you've sort of changed how you view the marketing site recently, or maybe it's also recent now, but that it used to be more like the place that users could come to log in and like get help using the product and get inspiration, things like that. Whereas now there's much more of a focus on getting new people to try Sketch. So tell me more about that shift.

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Carly:- Yeah, sure. I think it sort of sits in hand in hand with the growth of the company from both sort of the marketing function but also the product function. So when I joined it was the website was the sort of place for new customers and existing customers, and that's fine, but it ended up being a bit of a blurry place, and trying to figure out, you know, an information architecture that worked for all of those people, trying to make sure that we're putting the right pages in place to meet all of those audiences was tricky. So behind the scenes we started to develop the products so that we could have a better place in the app to show what's new, a discovery window so that we could promote sort of educational resources or updates that have happened. And then at the same time we introduced a redirect. So anybody who's logged into the Mac app or web app would go straight into product rather than having to go into the website, which feels right, actually, because if you've got all the information you need anyway and you just wanna get on do your work, then you shouldn't have to come, you know, via the website to do that. So that was quite a significant change for us, for me in particular where I saw an opportunity to say actually, you know, we need to make this more of a prospecting tool. We need to make this, you know, much more of a better sort of a hub and a resource for people to experience Sketch and educate themselves around Sketch because actually they could do everything they couldn't do before actually in product. So let's keep the shop window, for new people who wanna come in and then act as a strategic change in terms of how then we have re-orchestrated now the information architecture, the pages that are now on the site, the content that comes with it. And it's sort of set our direction in a neat way. We don't call out anywhere exclusively that the website is only for new customers. We've got docs on the site, which is a very well used tool, from our existing customers, but it's very much more focused on educating and supporting new users and getting them to try and buy Sketch.

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Charli:- Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Let's talk about some of the pages then that exist now in service of that. Some of these feature pages that you referenced before Oz, that's the handoff page, prototyping page. Did these pages exist on a previous version of the site or were they brand new with this new approach?

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Oz:- Yeah, they are brand new pages. We only had some mentions here and there, you know, about the features that we do. But yeah, we didn't have these dedicated pages and yeah, they were long time coming, with, yeah, we needed those badly.

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Charli:- Well tell me more about that. How did you know you needed them? How did you decide what pages you needed to build and was it, did it come from a place of, I don't know, we've noticed this is a question people have or like something that blocks them from signing up cause they're unsure about this feature. How did you decide what you needed to show on the site?

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Oz:- Well I think cause they are quite, you know, big features, they're kind of major. They are the crux of the workflow, you design, you prototype and then you kind of handoff. That's the flow and we kind of, we wanted to communicate that flow. We needed to show that in a visual way and, you know, what Sketch does for them. So yeah.

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Charli:- And what does the process look like for working on one of these pages? I'm assuming that product marketers are involved in this, somehow, Carly? Do they come in to contribute to the content to like what story we should be telling on these pages?

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Carly:- Yeah, totally, totally. This to our product marketing does come into the forefront really. We are really lucky in the way at Sketch that we have access to product managers and our co-founders still very available and accessible, and very much interested in how we communicate and externalize our offer. So it's great to have that sort of expertise, not only to validate technically what we, you know, what we are trying to communicate, is this right or wrong, but actually to layer in with opinion as well in terms of positioning. So yeah, product marketing manager would then work with the product managers, We've opened up a dedicated Slack channel, and then we'll start by defining sort of what is almost like a page narrative, like what are the core things we want to communicate on this page and make sure we've got agreement and alignment there. And then we sort of build out from that and create a skeleton outline of the page and then think about the content that we need to substantiate and validate each part. So product marketing plays a huge role, but we couldn't do it without the help of our fellows on the product side who are in it like from beginning to end in a very collaborative and very respectful way, like it's just a really nice, it sounds a bit sort of like textbook or through rose-tinted glasses, but it's a really nice process. There's no sort of friction or anything associated with it. We just, you know, we all want this common goal and I think back to your earlier question and what I was answered was, you know, we felt very strongly from a marketing perspective that we were sort of not doing our best job of promoting the product, because we were saying everything you need to design, collaborate, handoff and prototype, prototype then handoff even, but we didn't have any of the content to back it up other than a few sentences. So we knew that we had to do a better job, because we've got such a great products and the way we were gonna do that was to create these core pages. So it's really been a few months this year as core highlights of when we've been able to ship these instrumental hero pages and it's so good to have them there. We sort of look at it now and we're like, "Why have we not had done these sooner?" Like, it's a no brainer, but sometimes you have to do these things to realize actually it was missing, and sorry, you also asked about like what was the catalyst. We knew that we needed to do it, but we were also getting a lot of feedback from our customers, from our social listening that we do that people just were not understanding the offer or they were coming onto the site and then perhaps not exploring it enough. So we knew that we needed to have more content, more narrative to actually to help present the products in a better way so people could understand it and try. A bit of a mixture in terms of how they all came about.

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Charli:- Yeah, cause it's like before you were telling, like you were saying we have these features, but now you're showing them, not only through the narrative of the page, but also like we were talking about before, Oz, with all the touches you've added, like I need people to go on the developer handoff page in particular, we'll link it in the show notes, and just like stretch your browser out and in and you can see the numbers changing. Like that is just a touch from me that I'm as designer like Chef's kiss, I love it, like such a great little detail. But where do you come in, in this process, Oz? Where does design start? Are you giving feedback on the narrative of the page, the structure? Do you get handed a content doc that you're then like, you know, apply wire framing, moving through the process from there? Tell me about it.

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Oz:- Yeah, I come in I guess involved in the beginning, but yeah, the main the structure of the page I guess, comes from marketing, comes from copywriters, for example, and we kind of, we take that content and lay out on the page, do a few iterations, do a few wire frames, and then start adding the details but, yeah, you know, as Carly said, it's very like collaborative process, we can always give our suggestions, if we say, "Oh, this doesn't feel right," this is, you know, too much copy or, you know, we-

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Charli:- That's a good piece of feedback. I'm sure you end up giving a lot, cause that's what I end up giving a lot. It's always like, can we make this shorter?

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Oz:- Yeah, yeah. Shorter or sometimes, it's just like the copy's, it doesn't like, I think in particular on the handoff page, I think there was a bit of a discussion going like we, as designers, wanted it, like quick features. What does this particular area do? I think this the most fun parts of designing to deciding it's little features. I think that particular one and the handoffs came about from our tool really, from Sketch itself because that's how the developer handoff works on the web app. So kind of tried to communicate that on the website, on the page, but we kind of also try to add these little Easter eggs or these little interactions throughout the site in general, you know, sometimes it could be just a small, a hover change like on the newsletters page, when you hover, the newsletters change direction, could be a small animation here and there or sometimes the features are quite, those Easter eggs are hidden, for example, I think on most pages, I think you're on the pricing page, for example, and you click Control + L, it triggers a grid overlay on the page.

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Charli:- Nice.

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Oz:- Yeah, stuff like that. It's just quite fun sometimes.

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Charli:- Oh, we're getting all the secrets. I love that. Going back to talking about the design system as well, what I see as I look at these pages is like you can tell there's a system behind it, right? In the way you are laying out the content and I'm assuming that is part of like, you know, a component library in Sketch that you have to pull from, but then you are adding differences and making each page feel unique with the little touches that are inspired by the product. So I think it's a really cool approach. Tell me more about the design system, though. Cause I think this might be another, like Figma has really come out there with design systems and they're like, you know, owning this narrative. But Sketch was one of the first tools that I remember having the ability to have components and to be able to pull from them, design in one place, update across all your files. Tell me about how you have your design system for the marketing site set up in Sketch. Is it completely separate from the design system for the product?

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Oz:- Kind of started with the products, yeah, the product design system which we, you know, took some elements, took some basic elements like text tiles or CTA modules, stuff like that. And you know, we kind of tried to evolve it to adapt to marketing pages, so you know, maybe our messaging is longer sometimes, the CTAs could be longer, so we needed different types of CTAs, we added more modules which are more visual, for example. So yeah, we are still evolving it and it's only the beginning of it.

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Charli:- Yeah. What would you say the state that it's in now? Cause I know design systems are like live and breathe and things really, but where are you at with the Sketch marketing site design system and what's next for it, I guess?

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Oz:- I think we're probably, it's hard to say, 50% there maybe, I think it's more about it's constantly growing, it's constantly evolving. We're constantly adapting it. There won't be an end to it.

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Charli:- Yeah.

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Oz:- I think.

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Charli:- Never ending project.

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Oz:- Yeah, we try to just add new stuff in it and also because we in the team, in the web team, it's only three designers at the moment, so we kind of have the luxury of managing the system ourselves, and we wanna add new stuff we can, not really dependent on-

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Charli:- Right. So there's not a separate team working on it. You're all, you're doing it. Yourselves.

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Oz:- Yeah, we're all doing it, but we kind of, I think the next step I guess for our design system is to hand it over to our design system's manager who manages overall kind of Sketch libraries and, you know, give that to him and to kind of align it maybe to the product. But it's still quite nice to keep that separation. Gives us more freedom

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Charli:- More ownership.

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Oz:- and kind by more ownership. Yeah, for sure.

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Charli:- Yeah. What about, how does it apply to then the code base of the site? Is the design system reflected in that code base where you can say to a developer, we're using this component and they can pull it or whatever?

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Oz:- Yeah, so we are closely working with developers. I guess that's also another big kind of thing that why we're not giving away our design system is because we are still closely working together with the developers, you know, defining the font size for example, that, you know,

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Charli:- All those details.

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Oz:- different font sizes, yeah, all the details, colors and all that. And yeah because we are still changing our visual language from the old look, as Carly was saying, to this new look and feel. So yeah, it's pretty much still work to progress.

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Charli:- Still work in progress. Yeah. And you are working on it alongside or like developing it through creating pages like the handoff page, like the prototyping page, and I'm assuming each new page you create, you're like we need this to be in the system or this needs to change in the system to better work for us. Going back to talking about those feature pages, I'm curious to know how long that takes as a project, from start where you're like, we need this page, we're starting to create the content, to it being shipped, what timeframe are we talking about here?

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Carly:- It depends on what pages. So we just this week relaunched our design page and our collaboration page, mostly because they were the two existing pages that we had before we created prototyping and handoff. So they talked to prototyping and handoff and obviously our capabilities have increased, but now we've got our own pages for prototyping and handoff. We needed to retrofit, it's a work in progress all the time. So they were like relatively quick, like copy tweaks within a few days, back into design flow for a few days, back into development, actually the designer who was working on that as a developer as well, so he's just run it as a project. So I think we've turned it around pretty much within two weeks, which is good because we still need to do that validation, internally with our teams to make sure that what we're saying is accurate and reflective. But the prototyping and handoff pages, we're probably working in the timeframe of about six weeks.

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Charli:- Okay.

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Carly:- So beginning to end,

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Charli:- That's pretty good.

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Carly:- from sort of ideation, yeah, not bad, not bad, ideation to then delivery. So, you know, I think that we worked hard and we worked fast so I know six weeks, you seem surprised, but I think some people who perhaps are outside as design marketing would see that as how could you not do this in sort of a couple of weeks time?

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Charli:- Right, Right.

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Carly:- And recognizing, you know, we wanna design these pages from scratch and actually these pages do need to speak to our design community, so they need to be approached in the right way. But yeah, it's about a six week time frame, I would say, for anything particularly new that we need to craft a new narrative for, and then craft a new design, and then develop for as well, so.

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Charli:- In that period, is that the only project that a designer is focusing on? Or are they sort of doing-

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Carly:- No.

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Charli:- Yeah, that's wishful thinking isn't it?

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Carly:- I could sit here and lie.

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Oz:- That'd be nice.

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Carly:- I think it's fair to say Charli, and I always like to be fairly honest, you know, at Sketch, and I think it's not dissimilar to any other company, like we've got lots of priorities that we need to run, you know, simultaneously. And in particular with the Sketch offer, we wanted to sort of attack it quite quickly and we saw a window of opportunity to sort of try and reeducate people in terms of what we do and what we offer. So we couldn't really afford to focus on just one thing at a time. I mean there are some, you know, QA that needs to have, we do design QA within our own team, that happens, there's some smaller tweaks and fixes, but I'll let Oz talk about it. I mean in some ways it's not ideal because you've got that distraction and you lose focus, but in sometimes as well, like it's good to have a break and when stuff is being socialized for review or feedback,

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Charli:- You move onto something else.

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Carly:- Yeah, it gives us a little bit of a slot to, but what I would say is we wouldn't ever do anything big in parallel. So when Oz was doing that prototyping page, he wouldn't be concurrently doing another big, like one of our competitor pages or anything like that. It would be more smaller, quick wins that we can turn around, that require sort of perhaps a little less intense focus made. But I'll let Oz speak cause I realize I'm speaking for him.

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Oz:- No, I mean, yeah just to kind of say on the design side, it's because we are at the same time developing the design systems and developing this language, this change from, you know, the previous look to the new look. I think that's why it's taking maybe a bit longer to do it rather than, you know, if we had already like assets ready to go, for example, that's even more than one project.

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Charli:- I always like to like, I had a feeling that was gonna be your answer and I like to stress it cause I think often in the product design space, designers are just focused on like one feature for months at a time. That is all they're dedicated to. And I just think marketing designers, the unsung heroes of the tech industry, because we are able to multitask quite efficiently on like one big project and then a bunch of these other like small coals in the fire, so to speak, at the same time. So thank you for validating,

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Oz:- Yes, exactly.

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Charli:- that view that I had. One last question about the marketing site in general. I'm curious to know how often you do like A/B test, or user research or anything like that to inform design decisions or content decisions on the marketing site.

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Oz:- We do our research on the bigger projects. Like we had one in the beginning of the year, which was the change to the actual navigation. So the information structure of the site, so we needed to do, you know, more research.

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Charli:- And who runs those, like who conducts that user research?

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Oz:- Sometimes we do it ourselves. So I had to kind of learn this was a good skill to have. That was really interesting. Yeah, we used, you know, tree testing exercises just to see what user clones were, you know, best suited for the site. So, mainly for big projects.

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Charli:- That makes sense, it's too much to do to like run user tests for every little thing.

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Oz:- It would be nice, like would be really nice, I mean we do kind of stress test, I guess, with our design iterations. We do shadow channels after people's opinions, the design process itself kind of, you know, stress testing in the way until we just turn to the right solution.

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Carly:- Yeah, it's something as well, like we are keen to get to, Charli, I think just time is not on our side. We're playing a bit of a catch up game and then when we do catch up, something changes and then we're back in catch up mode again. So I think it's something that we commonly, and I as marketeer feel like strongly about A/B testing and the fact that we should explore and see and test and optimize and refine. But I think there's that reality that we're working in at the moment where we've got to just play catch up, build these pages that don't already exist and then once we've got those in place, then we can iterate for them. And it's something that A/B testing, I would say, is happening more frequently perhaps with our, you know, email communication programs with subject line testing. We're just exploring it with some campaign landing pages, which you can be more developed around a templated approach rather than a bespoke design, which will give us that agility as well. But it's something, yeah, we do wanna do more from a web perspective, we just haven't quite got there yet.

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Charli:- You gotta have the base in first before you can run the tests on it.

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Carly:- Yeah.

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Charli:- So that makes a lot of sense. Let's move on and talk about competitor pages. Cause this is something we haven't spoken about before on the show. It's something that I've ended up designing at ConvertKit for how we compare to other email marketing platforms out there. I know you have a few, like a set of competitor pages for Sketch, compared to other design tools. How did you decide that you wanted to have these pages on your site, that you wanted them to exist?

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Carly:- We saw that in particular, Figma had had a Sketch versus Figma page for quite a while. We didn't really want to do something similar. We hadn't been sort of too interested in that sort of, okay, that's what they feel and that's what they wanna communicate then each to their own. Like you need that bit, you want to use that bit of content, we perhaps don't want to do that right now. But what we are finding was that, again, from social listening for feedback from our larger customers, with our customer success team, and just sort of noise in general is that it was becoming a bit too overshadowing and we weren't really playing it, you know, didn't have any defense to it or any narrative. So all of a sudden actually what another competitor might be saying about you is true because you're not sort of talking about it or you don't have a counter. So we felt that with the addition of real-time collaboration that came last year and our prototyping capabilities, so we've got web app, we've moved on into a new space that we just, we wanted to use it as a way to sort of help articulate that and perhaps actually the audience has changed. A lot of people are used to now review sites or competitor comparison sites, those sorts of things. So actually are we missing a trick here that we don't have something to support that. So that's why I decided after a while and there have been a lot of debate internally whether we should do it or not, that we actually took the decision to make those, but we didn't go out of our way to publish or promote them, we wanted to treat it as a discovery exercise. So if you're on the site, as part of your decision making process, you want to, you know, read that validation or familiarize yourself with it, you can, but we are not pushing on anyone. It's not part of our trial conversion comms or anything in that sense, it is that discovery exercise. But it was quite a tricky brief for me to give the design team just because I wanted us to focus more on the narrative around it. I didn't want to necessarily be design-led, which sounds strange and counterproductive, but I wanted us to create a destination for people to read about and to digest that information, which was really hard for us because that meant sort of perhaps knocking back the design, but not stripping away the design, but introducing the design in the way that actually lets the narrative do the hard work and lead on it and then the design supports it. And as we went through that process of backing and forthing and I think a lot of iterations we got to where we are today, but I don't think that was an easy brief I gave them, but I think I'm really pleased with the end result, we got there and it looks good. But Oz, over to you.

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Charli:- It does look good. Yeah, I'm keen to hear Oz, how you came to this approach and like any design thinking behind this, cause it feels like with these pages, it would've been a really long Google talk over the content, right? We were just talking before about how we often like to try shorten the content, but the solution you've come to, well yeah, I'll let you speak to it, gets people scrolling, right? And it keeps people moving through content.

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Oz:- Yeah, exactly. I think that was the idea. It started with, I'd say a standard approach on the page, but we kind of started with, oh yeah, let's do something maybe similar to the feature page where we then talk about all these little features, where we have the space to have all these details and play around with those, but Carly was like, no, needs to be that narrative, needs to follow the story here. And yeah, we kind of started stripping back and laying out just kind of the main sections, started with just simply main sections, and the storyline and how we could make people read it. Whether it's a horizontal scroll or it's, you know, just a standard scroll down the page, yeah, did a few iterations and distilled it into something quite simple, but makes people's scrolling and, again, added the little details. And we happened to have our little diamond, which was something turning round, so again, that was a nice kind of discoveries that we had. Cause I think, I didn't know we had it in and somebody posted it, "Oh yeah, I really like the motion, can we make it react to the page? Yes, let's add it in."

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Charli:- Nice. Yeah, it's a really elegant solution to long content, right? That was the interactions that you've got here in terms of the content, the question being sticky, the color changing it does make you wanna keep scrolling through and I think it makes sense to not fill the page with product screenshots, cause if you're at the point that you're comparing, you've probably seen the basics of the product and like understand what it is and you really wanna know the differences. So it is more about that story. That makes a lot of sense. I noticed there's a quite a templated approach to these pages too, right? Where you've been able to duplicate the design in a way or apply the same approach to different competitors, which I'm sure sped up the process of getting the set of pages created.

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Oz:- Yeah, definitely. That was the idea. Probably, you know, get that template right and then apply it across, you know, different competitors. Yeah.

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Charli:- Okay. So we can't talk about competitor pages without talking about the fact that two of your main competitors are now like joined

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Carly:- One.

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Charli:- and gonna be one. Yeah. So if we need to update to a Figma Adobe page or Adobe Figma page later on, I noticed that when this news broke, it'll be like a couple of weeks ago, maybe several months ago by the time this episode comes out, that your team was very fast to update this get first Figma page and there's a little line added to the table that says, "Independent", little check mark next to Sketch. Tell me more about how you decided to just take action on that and make that update quickly.

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Carly:- Quite right. It was something that was sort of unplanned, and just sort of sprung out of nowhere. But we saw that a good opportunity to sort of re-educate, remind people what Sketch has to offer. And if you haven't looked at us in a few years or a bit out of date, this is a good opportunity like people in market now to reappraise. Like, and that's healthy. Like, we truly believe, like there's a huge market for design tools, product design tools, digital product design tools, and we are a part of that and people like choice. So when Figma-gate came about, we quickly pulled our heads together and I don't mean dust my heads or leads in my own team, but as a complete team put our heads together in terms of actually how can we react in a, you know, in a positive and a supportive way. Like we've recognized that the community is probably uncertain about these changes, for good, for bad or however you feel, but we need to make sure that, you know, if people are thinking about now choice moving forwards, then we need to do a better job of educating what Sketch has to offer. So there was sort of some instant quick wins that we landed on. And the one that you've sort of picked out, Charli, was to quickly revisit those pages and just think about, we knew that was gonna be sort of a place, a destination that people would go to quickly, and our data and analytics have shown us that as well, as a result of that specific time period. But yeah, we compiled the list of immediate stuff that we could do and then probably stuff that's sort of mid to longer term, but we felt it was really important to communicate that independent message. Sketch's always been independent, since when we started 12 years ago. We've got no plans to change that, and that's not for everyone and that's fine. But for us and perhaps with core community who are interested in wanting to use an independent tool, then actually let's make that really really clear. So that was one of the smaller changes we did to the site, we did some other sort of changes as well on our pricing page. We added in on the standard plan that we have an iPhone app, that allows you to view and play your prototype. So all of those sort of educational resources or tools, and destinations we wanted to update quickly. And then we started then to quickly move into sort of the mid and then the longer term plans and the mid one, when I say mid, I mean it was sort of done within a week. So is it mid? I don't know. But we thought as well, it's a good opportunity to create a destination landing page again, that we would treat as a discovery exercise. So if people are on our site and going to a decision making process, we didn't want 'em to have to worry about having to go to lots of different pages to get a clear understanding of what the Sketch is now and today. So within a week, we wrote, we did this in a week. Within a week, we wrote, we designed, we developed and we launched that page that exists on the site now, which is why switch cheaply back to Sketch if you like. But that all happened within, yeah, five days. Our quickest turn around ever.

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Charli:- That is a very quick turnaround for a brand new page. What was the design process like for this, Oz? What considerations did you have to make or changes to the process to be able to get that done in that timeframe?

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Oz:- Well, lots of copy in the beginning, just lots of stuff flying left and right, everywhere. Over time, yeah, trying to distill that and trying to cut down, I guess, as much as possible, cause the page's still quite heavy, we'll try to, yeah, distill the messages and yeah, just again, quite a few, well not a lot of iterations actually, but I think this one resorted to our design system, to our existing modules, stuff that we had done previously, and yeah, clicked the page together and we had maybe a day to care about the small things.

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Charli:- Still nice you got a day for that.

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Oz:- Yeah, I think so. Well kind of working together with developers so at the same time the page was developed, we were still tweaking stuff, but it's, you know, it's version one, it's yeah, version two coming. So...

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Charli:- In the longer term? Yep. Nice.

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Oz:- Yep. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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Carly:- It was great, though, Charli, the team pulled together so well, and like we hadn't really, it was such a time sensitive moment, we couldn't afford to take any more time than what we did. So I think, you know, it's testament to the team and how they worked together and sort of a lot of direction and input and being available in a supportive way as well, from like the wider team all encouraging each other like we can do this. But it was really from I suppose the outside, when I say the outside not being part of design and development, only giving sort of feedback and direction. But it was great to see them work in a really pragmatic way. So the design would be locked in for the first quarter of the page and then development team would be developing that, and then we'd never really done that before in that way and we realized there was risk associated with that, and it's not sort of orthodox or you know, it's not the way we ideally should or need to be working, but cause of those time sensitivities we did it and it actually works. So good team effort there.

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Charli:- And it definitely sounds like all the systems you had set up for doing work at like a regular pace really came into play here and let you like turn the speed up for this page when you needed to. You could rely on those systems that you'd set up in the past.

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Oz:- Yeah, exactly. Borrowing the same modules. They you don't have to think about the styling,

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Charli:- Yeah. Decisions, in the past you made those decisions.

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Oz:- Some of the basics, yeah, they're all there. But also I guess having the luxury of, you know, we were able to dedicate two, three developers just to kind of working on the page. So yeah, that was

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Charli:- All hands on.

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Oz:- A big help. Oh yeah.

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Charli:- Tell me more about how you measure success on the marketing site. Cause you mentioned, Carly, seeing like a spike in the analytics visitors to the comparison page when this news broke. So like, not just for that page, but on an ongoing basis, what metrics are you holding the marketing site accountable to?

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Carly:- Yeah, so I would say when we talk about sort of data and metrics, that we've got sort of I suppose hard data and quantitative stuff that we look at and also qualitative. We feel like it has to be really balanced when it comes to, you know, how we appraise what success looks like or what improvement plan we should put in place. So we obviously have the standards like most teams do in terms of sort of Google analytics, which is all anonymized. Like we have very honest tracking policy at Sketch, but we do like to see, yeah, you know, spikes of when people are entering the site. We like to see sort of journeys in terms of their path to buy and again it's all anonymized. But we do look at dwell time, so time on page is a good indicator, because our especially our feature pages are very rich of information. Like, it's not just we've got prototyping, here's a paragraph, off you go, there's sort of some features of prototyping that then need to be explained. So dwell time for us is really important, obviously bounce rate as well. It is really important, we also look at sort of repeat people coming back to the site, we don't necessarily expect people to convert and buy straight away. We expect them to go through that decision making process, think about it or try look to the community for, you know, support or words or influence or advocacy or any of those sorts of things as well. So we sort of do it in comparison. We've just recently launched Hotjar, it's a new initiative for us, again all anonymized, but it's starting to give us again sort of heat map and patterns of activity that we wouldn't have seen before. So we yet to sort of fully realize and capitalize on that just because of everything that's going on. But we think that that's gonna give us some nice insight as well. But we generally combine that, as I say, with some of the qualitative metrics and data that we get. Like we value our community, and the feedback they give us, we've got a research program that we run where we engage external people and parties to try tests. Not only product, but marketing initiatives too. We've got our social listening, and then we've got our feedback from our customer service and customer success team. So we generally put that all in one big pot of loveliness, and then that helps us then to either validate what instinctively we need to do back to introducing those prototyping and handoff pages or validate and give us direction of actually what we need to change. So at the moment, for example, our signup page, when you go to the signup page of our website, it's very sort of transactional. You go from this sort of beautiful dynamic environment where you've got lots of content and it's beautifully designed, and then when you go to the signup page, which it's a little bit simplified, and we know that people perhaps aren't getting the information or the reinforced messages they need on this. So the data is telling us, yeah the data's telling us actually we need to remind people like you need a Mac to be able to edit and design or you know, but also you've got a web app that you can view everything on. So some of those core things we need to introduce on certain pages. So yeah, that's how we sort of determine what we do from a marketing perspective. It's not sort of literally black and white data in silo. It's combined with other insights that we get.

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Charli:- And how close do you feel to the data, Oz? Do you feel like you make design decisions informed by data? Are you looking at the raw graphs or do you get like reports or, I don't know, insights from the team? Is that your main way of getting knowledge on how your designs are performing?

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Oz:- I mean, generally not. We kind of just, you know, we get the information that's already been distilled in a way. But sometimes, cause in marketing we have to, as marketing designers have to kind of try to design a lot of things. Does it have to be a feature page? It could be some little addition on the sign up. It could be a call to action change. So we kind of need to see that data sometimes, just to kind of see how people behave to, you know, to inform our design decisions. Generally I think for marketing we don't look at, you know, that kind of raw data. We do get SEO reports from search, cause that runs alongside the design and the copy. So yeah, that's something really handy to have.

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Charli:- Nice, and I know, Carly, you've told me before about how data not just informs like how something is doing that exists, but also what you might work on in the first place and like the level of effort that you might put into a project. Tell me more about the kind of decisions you are making, you know, at the CMO level, about what projects should be worked on based on data.

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Carly:- Yeah, it's a tricky one and not easy all the time, I would say, I mean from a marketing perspective, you know, I think my job is here to fill the top of the funnel, get people brought in to the website and ultimately, you know, to try, which is what we refer to as a marketing qualified lead. Someone who's signed up and-

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Charli:- Good old MQL.

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Carly:- The good old MQL. Yeah. So get them in and get them trying, and so, you know, that's where the majority of my focus is maintained in that top part of the funnel. It's not to say that I don't think anything is not important after that point, it's just that our level of marketing input then sort of becomes less, I would say, that's the long way of saying that, you know, we're still involved in sort of email communications, in life programs with our customers, retention comms, all those sorts of things. But I would say definitely the majority of the effort is in the top part of that funnel. It's tricky, though, because we've got like pages and content that we not only need to, you know, update and/or govern on the site, but new pages that we need to introduce and there's always just balance of like, how much effort should we put into this page and like we're not in the place where we can afford to necessarily design and bespoke design every single page, because that would take far too long. And actually by the time we've done it, stuff's changed, so we need to go back and do it again. So we'll be in this perpetual circle. So I'm unfortunately that person who has to sort of, you know, look at the data, have those informed conversations internally with senior, you know, stakeholders and leadership team, and decide then actually what we need to do. And then almost put like, not necessarily a rating behind it, but an indication of, you know, where we need to deploy our efforts the most. And as I said, where we are with the website, because we're playing that catch-up game with transitioning it to acquisition, you know, we've got to be sensible and savvy with our time. So there's pages which are more around, so perhaps, you know, our terms and conditions, for example, or policies that perhaps don't need that sort of marketing,

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Charli:- You don't need to spend six weeks on that. Yeah.

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Carly:- Yes, exactly. It's more of a facelift or something that makes it look great. But I think I'm very mindful of all of our key overarching hero pages that very much we're, you know, designers are our primary target audience, so we've gotta make sure that that experience is good and, you know, they're judging us, there's a critique going on in terms of that presentation. So yeah, it's not an easy thing and I don't think the design team always like it, in terms of, you know, that prioritization and quite often we'll have conversation about it. It's not necessarily me saying, right, this is what we are doing, this is the only amount of effort we can put into it, it is a collaboration, but at the end of the day I have to make some core choices about what's gonna deliver us the most amount of impacts and help us on our journey, so that we're sustainable for the future.

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Charli:- That makes a lot of sense. I find myself as co-director, I'm leading the brand studio team at ConvertKit, and I can find myself stressing about this one page that I'm like, ah, this is not up to our quality bar, it's not as good as it could be. I look at the data and I'm like, you know what? This page gets like a third of the traffic that this other page gets, so we should probably invest a third of the effort into it.

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Carly:- Yeah, it's also, I think it's really like, okay, so those conversations are not easy to have and, you know, I value design, I wouldn't have design, I've got, you know, a really strong team of designers in my team who are extremely experienced and capable and moving our website on in directions and realizing the vision. So that's brilliant. You know, we're gonna manage that relationship and I respect the work they're doing, but it is hard sometimes to have those conversations. And what I sort of try and pull up on as well is that the community inside of Sketch is very, very supportive, like designers and non-designers who are working on products or whatever part of the business they are. And we always share and celebrate what we are doing internally and there's a lot of, you know, chatter around that, lots of, you know, commentary, and a lot of positive reaction and support. So whenever we do need to launch something that perhaps doesn't have so much effort in it, or we took that decision not to do so much on it and then it's validated either internally or equally externally, like a page that we thought, oh perhaps we should have done a bit more on it or it wasn't really where we are, we've already seen that. We've got 10 tweets about it with people saying, this is class, this page is really great and it's really important that the social team then socialize that internally within our wider marketing team, so the designers developers see it and know that actually we've made the right decision or, you know, actually what we're doing is good. So I always make sure that, you know, other voices contribute to that. So it's not just me being that single, a single person giving that overarching direction.

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Charli:- Yeah, yeah. It's a conversation. Something in what you said, Carly, made me wanna ask you Oz, how it feels to be designing for fellow designers? Like do you feel an extra sense of pressure with the pages you're designing that you know that people who know all the details about design and the process are gonna be looking at it and judging it quite frankly?

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Oz:- Yeah, I think so. It's big pressure in a way, you know, it's fun, it's nice design, that's what we do. But at the same time, yeah it's a lot of pressure, but it also is really nice to kind of see that social reaction, that kind of validation, once, you know, something you've done is actually being appreciated. Yeah, that's a nice feeling.

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Charli:- That's cool.

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Oz:- Yeah.

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Charli:- And I'm sure there must be like, it must be fun to also be the target audience of the products you're designing a marketing site for as well. That's what I find about it. Cause I'm a creator, we're a product for creators, and I get to be both a user, and the marketing designer for our product.

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Oz:- Yeah, definitely. I think that's why sometimes I kind of have to put ourselves in the user's shoes as well and that's how the developer handoff or the prototyping pages, yourself and user's shoes, like well, what do they expect? What do they want? What's the journey for them, to fill all the shoes?

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Charli:- Well let's end by talking, for each of you in your time at Sketch so far, about either the project or I dunno, the page you designed, the impact that you've had, that you are most proud of. Do you wanna start, Oz?

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Oz:- I think definitely the feature pages, the developer handoff in particular, that was a really cool project to work on. You know, so many people involved, product managers as well, kind of getting all the insights was amazing and yeah, that was a big effort from the team. When I started, we had to redesign our newsletters, so basically all our marketing communications, that was a big project as well because we had to, luckily some many clients, so many different browsers, and we had to maintain the quality as well, at Dark Modes, oh my God, that's-

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Charli:- It's a whole other story. Yeah.

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Oz:- That was a big challenge, I think quite successful as well.

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Charli:- Nice. What about you Carly?

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Carly:- You know, it's a really hard question Charli.

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Oz:- Well Oz picked two things, so you can pick two as well if you want.

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Carly:- Yeah, yeah, I can pick two, I can pick two. I don't wanna echo Oz, but I think like the realization of these feature pages and anybody in my team has known I've been bleating on about these for a long time, so to see those being realized is great, but not just realize like in the basic elements, like the fact that we managed to launch them and we did something different with them and I love that. Like we're pushing things on, I'm always, I dunno, in my career I've always liked to sort of work with teams and with companies where you've been able to push marketing efforts on where it's not ordinary, it's extra extraordinary. And I still believe in that, like now where I am in my career, and it's just taking notes, just as an example, as sort of game changers in terms of doing a better job of presenting our products, but actually doing things really, really well. So definitely those feature pages. But I think the whole sort of evolution of the site and making that sort of all geared up to Oz's point, like changing the newsletter or our email comms, applying the visual language to signal a change. I think so often we associate like a rebrand with a rebirth and a new direction and I very much saw that sort of visual language that came out at the same time, a real-time collaboration as that opportunity to sort of represent Sketch. And it's taken a little while for us to sort of fully realize on that with some of the education, but we started a nice momentum now that we can continue by developing these core pages. So I think I'm just very happy with the direction we're taking overall, which might sound like a slightly politician's answer, but it's the truth.

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Charli:- You've answered “everything”. Yeah. Is what you're proud of.

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Carly:- Yeah.

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Charli:- No, but I do hear in what you're saying there too about these pages and the approach you took, going back to what you were saying earlier, Oz, about design trends and like wanting to capitalize on them, but also create them for yourselves too. And the way you've used elements of the product as design details on the page, I think is very fresh and new and it's just, yeah, it's great work and we'll be looking forward to following along with what you're shipping next.

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Oz:- Thank you very much.

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Charli:- Yeah, thanks for everything you shared today, Carly and Oz, really appreciate all of the behind the scenes insights. 

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I hope you enjoyed that episode. I loved how open the Sketch team were about talking about their competitors and their place in the market and I would definitely not be surprised to see a Sketch resurgence happening very soon, especially with the great work they're doing to like reintroduce themselves to the design community. I also loved seeing all the ways in which the Sketch product informs the design of the Sketch marketing site, and that they put in the time for little touches, like the numbers changing on the handoff page. Go explore the site for yourself at sketch.com and you'll find links to follow both Carly and Oz in the description. If you've been enjoying the season so far, I would absolutely love it if you'd head to Apple Podcasts and leave us a review. It helps me to get the show in front of more people and it also helps me to get more great guests on too. So thank you in advance for going and doing that. Thanks also to Webflow for sponsoring this season. You'll find a link to check them out too in the show notes, and you can head to insidemarketingdesign.com not only to see an example of a site built in Webflow, but you'll also find all the other episodes of the season so far there on the site. There's plenty more to come this season. So I will see you next week for a new episode. Bye.

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