Last December Sentry debuted Rollback, a year-in-review experienced that turned user data into a personalized story. While the engineering team has already talked about the project from a technical perspective, I wanted to show off the design process — how we built Rollback from the ground up.
We all know the drill. Hack Week. Experiment. Try stuff. You get it. I love the promise of a Hack Week: a time-boxed challenge to create something useful without overthinking it. This time, because I sit on the design team, I decided I wanted to try and make a typeface.
Every year the Creative Team at Sentry produces a holiday gift for everyone at the company in a tradition we call Spectivus. Last year we decided to make a custom keyboard and it turned out pretty rad.
If you’ve read any product or UX books—or if you’ve ever hired product or design folks—you’re probably familiar with the typical linear process for building the “right” product. It goes something like this:
I have always been a metalhead – black, speed, Norwegian, death, DOOM I love it all. So, this year for our annual hackweek I decided to Metalify (is that even a word?) the Sentry logo.
The hardest thing about design work ain’t the design. Sure, learning about typography and color theory and everything else in the beginning sure is overwhelming. There’s so many books to read! So many things to learn! All the tiny details in Figma or Illustrator! Or figuring out the weirdness of CSS! But it took me over a decade in this field to realize that all this stuff that I struggled to learn is really the easy part of design. The border radii and copywriting and UX work is monkey business compared to the hardest thing you’ll do as a product designer.
Here’s a punk rock opinion that will shock you to your foundations: writing is hard. Especially so when it comes to product design, since first you have to understand precisely how something works and then you have to succinctly explain to the user why you’re telling them about this complicated thing and then what they need to do next. Ugh! That’s hard!
We recently commissioned a custom modular synth for the Sentry SF office from the audiovisual designer Love Hulten.
In addition to fighting pixels, The Sentry Design Team fights a lot of other things as well. We fight ugly sweaters, lego sets, Senkey diagrams, developer conferences — often things where there's little to no prior art or reference to draw from. This is why today we're launching Sentry.Design, which is our attempt to improve that in some small way.
