# Claire's Reference Letter

## Relationship
I was Claire's coworker at Nulab, Inc - we worked together for around 2 years. As a front-end developer who often worked with the marketing team, I had the pleasure of working with Claire on a number of projects. We worked together to spec out various projects and convert abstract requirements into concrete sets of deliverables (new pages, web animations, A/B testing variations on existing pages, etc). Also, I was often the one tasked with converting web page mock-ups that she created into actual pages.

## Role & responsibilities
Claire was the web and graphic designer at Nulab and worked primarily within the framework of the marketing team. Her design work was as varied in nature as it was prolific - once our internal milestones were established, she regularly produced a slew of designs to further those goals. To name a few, she has created webpage wireframes and high-fidelity mock-ups, animations, icons, free-hand graphics, CTA banners, email templates, and more. For a time, we also hired a contract designer - Claire oversaw this individual, offering guidance and coordinating with them to ensure that the integrity of Nulab's brand was preserved.

## Impactful projects
Claire was the design lead in shaping the visual design language that is shown on the majority of Nulab's public websites. Page for page and section by section, the company website, two product websites and their corresponding blogs were all designed by Claire. She worked to establish a consistency in the fonts, colors, visual hierarchies, and imagery across Nulab's web properties that helped to cohere these sites together; her many contributions helped establish them as related facets of a singular brand, rather than just a bunch of random websites that link to each other. I have no doubt that these efforts significantly bolstered Nulab's perception as a modern, trustworthy, capable software company. The metrics reflected the same conclusions: Nulab's product blogs enjoy regular, repeat traffic, and cross-selling metrics have steadily increased.

## Please list below what you feel are this person's specific strengths.

As Claire's coworker and friend, I'd be first in line to further praise her design ability, but I honestly think her portfolio speaks for itself. After working with many teams and personalities over the years, I believe Claire's unique strength is her ability to work in a strategic and multidisciplinary way, communicating with other roles and personalities as needed to get the job done. She firmly demonstrates the philosophy of "firm opinions, loosely held" - that is to say, she does not design in a vacuum. She understands that there's a time for flair and a time to just get something done. For example, we had several pages for which we were receiving almost 100% desktop traffic, so she made the wise business design of NOT creating a mobile version, instead of being a design purist that would've ended up wasting developer time. Another time, we wanted to create an animation, and she did the research to explore the "optimal" way to create it - whether that meant handrolling it frame-by-frame on Illustrator or tasking a developer with hand-coding it with CSS. Eventually, because of image size, ease-of-creation and maintainability, etc, she decided on the latter, and worked with me to make sure the animation came out as per her vision. Coupled with her overall pleasant disposition, passion for the field, standards for individual excellence, and collaborative mindset, I firmly believe Claire would be a wonderful addition to any team she joins.

## Areas of development
As I worked alongside her for around two years, I'm well-attuned to the environment that she works in, and while I have nothing but respect for the company in question, I would say that it is not the best in terms of efficient project management. Prohibitive time constraints were the norm and regrettably, severely compromising her designs - which were by no means grandiose - became a regular thing because of it. Also, given the company's origins in the primarily conservative country of Japan, I think a heavy cultural preference for "safe" designs was baked into every project. Within those limitations, I believe Claire still managed to build out a visually-compelling brand, but I believe this may have hampered her ability to experiment with new design techniques, technologies and more. To Claire's future manager, I would humbly advise that inasmuch as possible, projects be structured so as to give Claire and her team sufficient time to ramp up, learn new techniques and technologies, build up efficient processes, and work as a unit that not only "produces designs," but holistically leverages design-minded thinking to empower the company.