Product Designer
Vodafone (VOIS)
2015 – 2020 · Budapest
I moved to Vodafone in 2015, into VOIS, the shared-services side of the business. My team supported Vodafone Global Marketing. There were seven of us: two designers, a motion designer, a copywriter, a trainer and a product owner. The people we worked for sat at the Newbury campus in the UK and sold across all of Vodafone's markets, so our work went out everywhere they operated. This was Vodafone's B2B side, the company and enterprise products, separate from the Hungarian consumer business.
We made the marketing materials those teams used to pitch. It varied a lot in depth. Sometimes it was elevator-pitch level, just a quick way into a product, other times a full product sheet with everything in it, depending on what the product needed. Most of it was digital: presentations, cheat sheets, product sheets and the like. The offline work was mostly for customer-facing events, when Vodafone had a physical presence somewhere and wanted to market products in the space. That could be a full Vodafone event or a themed one like a cloud conference where they showed up with a few products, and we made the posters, mupis and stand material that went into it. We also did the visuals behind internal training, which the trainer on the team ran and we designed for. A product team would come to us, we'd build what they needed, and they'd take it and use it however suited them.
A product infographic I made for Vodafone Business Fleet Analytics, later used in a trade-magazine article (L'Automobile & L'Entreprise, France, 2019).
A product slide I built from the Vodafone Group Product Marketing 2016 Kick-Off, Newbury, UK.
My own patch was mostly the big internal presentations, the company, sector and platform-level ones, like the award ceremony. I came from an animation background, so I was comfortable building decks with motion and small animations in them, and I knew PowerPoint well alongside the usual Adobe suite for everything else. The other designer and I both handled the general work, but the event decks usually ended up with me.
Keeping other people's work on-brand was part of it too. This was the designers across Vodafone, not just my team. A product manager would often need a presentation that wasn't big enough to justify pulling in a designer but still had to look decent, and we'd show them how to put something together that stayed inside the brand. The brand didn't sit still either. There were three full rebrands in the five years I was there. The logo changed shape, the B2B photography went from colour to black and white, the rules for how the logo sat on imagery changed, the icon library got completely replaced. Every time one of those landed, someone had to go back through all the existing material and bring it up to the new brand, and a lot of that tedious work fell to us.
Some of that teaching got more formal through the Vodafone Academy, an internal programme where designers ran sessions for other employees. I taught animation in presentations, since that was my thing, and I also ran beginner HTML and CSS sessions, partly because I was into code and partly because people wanted to understand what sat behind the screen. Other designers covered their own topics, typography, colour theory, the design basics. The sessions were popular, more than I expected.
The award-ceremony slide I built for the team's Quarter Award. The figures shown are the whole team's output since 2015.