Say Hello to Andrew Chen, Senior Marketing Designer

What do you do?

I’m a Senior Marketing Designer at Instacart in Toronto. I work in our Product Marketing team and focus on our enterprise products.

How did you get into design?

I loved illustration as a child and spent most of my free time experimenting with different kinds of art. I discovered Photoshop around middle school and that was the real game-changer. A few years later I started a T-shirt business, began freelancing, found my way into the world of advertising, and then eventually tech.

What makes everything worth it?

I feel extremely fortunate that I get to do what I love for a living. Design really felt like a seamless transition between hobby and career for me. I’ve watched a lot of friends and family members toil at jobs they disliked for most of their lives and I feel more than lucky to count myself in a different camp.

What’s the greatest piece of career advice you’ve ever received?

Not a specific piece of advice per se, but this Ira Glass quote about creative work has been very influential in my life: “Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years, you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”

What advice would you give to a designer just starting out?

Have fun and learn as much as you can. Design is a constantly evolving industry with new niches, skills, and opportunities appearing and disappearing all the time. While I agree it’s important to become great at doing one thing early on in your career, getting exposure to what’s out there (and learning the foundations!) are critical.

Where do you find inspiration?

While I do spend time looking at my peers’ work on sites like Dribbble and Behance, I really enjoy finding inspiration off-screen. I love exploring old architecture, classic signage, and art. Even film and music can put me in a good creative headspace.

Working on various projects at Instacart, which one was the most challenging and exciting for you?

As a marketing designer working on our enterprise products, I’m constantly working on things that are geared toward other businesses. An example is presentation decks for meetings with potential retail partners. While I feel like presentation design gets a bad rap in the design field, I’ve enjoyed working on creating templates that are scalable and easy to use for non-designers.

Where did you grow up and what made it special?

I grew up in Southern California and moved around the LA area quite a bit (San Fernando Valley, Santa Clarita). I know I was lucky growing up in an environment that exposed me to diverse cultures and subcultures.

What was the first thing you ever designed?

My first paid project was a website for a payroll company. I coded it manually in wordpad with images created in Macromedia Fireworks. That was 2002.

What is something you’re most proud of in your life/career?

It’s a smaller event in the grand scheme of things but it’s still something I’m proud of: Growing up, I was really involved in the music scene and always dreamed of having a clothing brand and going on tour. Some of my friends and I bootstrapped a brand, selling t-shirts out of my basement and from my car at shows. After a couple of years, we grew it to the point of sponsoring bigger and bigger events and were eventually able to join a national tour, selling our stuff at shows around the country. We didn’t make much money but it was a lot of fun fulfilling a childhood dream.

What role does food play a part in your life?

In a way, food is life for me. I think it has a lot to do with being an American-born Chinese, but my entire life and memories really revolve around food as a shared experience. From a cultural standpoint, it’s easy for me to feel disconnected from my culture because I don’t speak or understand Chinese very well, but being able to cook and eat the way my family has for generations is a really meaningful experience to me. Food also represents adventure and discovery to me. In both cooking and eating, learning how to create and experience flavors is one of the most exciting things in life.

Come build with Andrew.

If you’re excited about defining the future of a one trillion dollar industry, building an ad-serving network for groceries, scaling the world’s most extensive grocery catalog, perfecting a real-time on-demand logistics chain, all while simultaneously designing the future of food for millions of people, you should take a look at the available opportunities or reach out to someone from the team.

Instacart

Instacart is the leading grocery technology company in North America, partnering with more than 1,400 national, regional, and local retail banners to deliver from more than 80,000 stores across more than 14,000 cities in North America. To read more Instacart posts, you can browse the company blog or search by keyword using the search bar at the top of the page.