Evermade welcomes a new senior designer
We have a new senior designer in the house, Thierry François! Thierry comes from Werklig and has been working at Evermade since March.
Thierry has extensive experience in digital design and branding, so we’re very happy to have him on board. We’ve updated our strategy to ensure continued success with our customers, and Thierry perfectly expands our capabilities in the right direction, says Riikka Pakarinen, Evermade’s CEO.
We asked Thierry some questions to better understand his expertise, ambitions, and personality.
Can you tell us about your background?
Born in Strasbourg, France, I’ve lived over half my life abroad. I studied what was then called multimedia (yes, this makes me feel old) back in France. It was a mix of graphic design, IT, networking, and a whole lot of programming — HTML, CSS, Java, and ActionScript (R.I.P. Flash). I then moved to England for an internship and continued studying graphic design, typography, and print. I worked in Newcastle for a while in the events industry, but also did a lot of marketing videos for Flymo and Gardena, which took us all the way to South Africa to film a whole product line.
Did you always want to live and work abroad?
For me, it happened quite naturally. I had the opportunity to go, so I took it. A while back, I had a chat with a friend about it – living abroad, various experiences, and jobs of different types – I think it creates individuals with a broader approach to life and business. I am generalizing, of course, but I hope I’ll get to continue experiencing more things.
I moved to Finland in 2011 and started out by freelancing. After that, I got a job in a branding agency. I did a lot of website design and development, plus some editorial design, but started slowly diving into packaging and branding. Towards the end, I was doing a lot of product innovation, developing brand and packaging concepts for the FMCG sector. This involved wine, spirits, and RTDs, mainly for Altia and some for Paulig. I also participated in the brand strategy and created visual identities.
The shift from web design and development to branding happened over a couple of years. In a way, I think we just followed the demand. I have always enjoyed the analytical side of things, so developing concepts and strategies was fun for me. I never thought I would be doing “this, and only this” throughout my career. I think the industry over the years has been going into more and more specialization, on the digital side at least. Sometimes talents can get hyper-focused and may lose sight of how their part fits into the bigger picture.
There was a discussion about the topic of specialization on Slack, right?
Yeah, I had a long, almost philosophical discussion with Timo Sundvik about design, the industry, and AI. Nowadays, we have UX designers, UI designers, service designers, interaction designers, experience designers, front-end, back-end, devOps, sysadmin…. But once upon a time, we just had one person doing it all: designing a site and launching it. And I’ve been pondering if the growing integration of AI into design tools and bringing in multiple competencies into one (like bringing front-end coding closer to the design process), means that at some point, we will see the current trend starting to reverse somehow. Maybe you won’t be able to be a UX/UI designer without knowing how to do front-end?
How did you end up back in the digital world?
I’ve had many roles since I came to Finland. I’ve worked in advertising and branding agencies and done a variety of projects from ice cream packaging to rebranding for startups, digital design and strategy, gamification, and content strategy. One could argue that even though it is digital design, I am still doing branding, as a brand is everything a business expresses itself with, and digital touchpoints are an integral part of today’s world.
Working in branding agencies, things can feel abstract or intangible. Not that I mind, but for me, the real reward lies in creating products or services for actual people, tangible things that have an impact on people’s daily lives.
What made you decide to join us?
Excitement is contagious. I love that at Evermade, people are open to innovating, trying new things, and keep growing a thriving business. I love creating new, and the endless possibilities are what convinced me.
We’ve been ramping up a lot of our digital strategy work, design, and cross-competence synergy, and delivering real results and change for clients. That’s what excites me — strategy informing design, and design informing technical implementation.
Connect with Thierry on LinkedIn.