Say Hello to Genesis Silva, Senior Brand Designer

What do you do?

I help develop the Instacart visual identity and enforce it across all touchpoints of our multi-sided marketplace. I’m working to not only establish a really an authentic voice but ensure that it’s communicated appropriately for our various audiences.

How did you get into design?

I’ve always been some kind of artist. From the moment I had any dexterity in my hands, I was drawing, sculpting, or building something. When I was around 11, I taught myself basic CSS/Html so that I could build websites to share my art. Long before there was Facebook, I spent a lot of time creating custom banners, pixel art, and other graphic freebies for people to download and share on Myspace. I didn’t really know graphic design was something I could study until an open house at a design school showed me I could combine all of my interests into one career.

What makes everything worth it?

I love making work that makes people feel good and promotes a kind of social awareness. It’s one thing to make beautiful things, but if that beautiful thing also makes people care, then that’s really winning.

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

I wasn’t given this advice, but a former creative director once signed me up for a 6-week pitch class. I complained the entire time, but it taught me valuable skills I still take into every presentation. Knowing how to sell an idea and do it with poise is something every designer should learn.

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

Study good storytelling. Learn the pacing, narrative arc, body language, and visuals that go into a good pitch presentation. Design is not just about doing good design, but convincing others of why it’s good. You have to be able to talk the talk.

Where do you find inspiration?

Sooooo many illustrators and tattoo artists on the internet! I try to keep my social feeds full of art — and less of anyone I actually know — so that I’m constantly reminded of how great it is to make. Aside from the obvious though, I find lots of inspiration from natural life. I love studying flowers, bugs (seriously, have you ever watched a spider trap a wasp and eat it?), and the otherwise invisible aspects of our environment. There’s so much that nature can teach us if we just pause for a moment to observe.

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

When I joined Instacart, our visual brand was relatively underdeveloped and expressed inconsistently across various touchpoints. I feel eager and inspired by the opportunity to really develop our visual style from the ground up with the rest of my team. It’s definitely challenging to consider all the different channels that the brand touches and to create a system around them, but the opportunity for huge impact is there, and I see it as one of the more important projects I have encountered in my career so far.

Where did you grow up and what made it special?

I grew up in a faraway suburb of Miami called Goulds that had a lot of agricultural land and not much else. It was pretty desolate for the most part as it was sprinkled with abandoned homes and vehicles, but it was the lushest area in all of Miami-Dade County. My mother’s backyard had coconuts, mangos, avocados, guavas, and bananas. Just down the road, I could walk to a strawberry farm famous for its smoothies. If I walked any further I could visit the monkey sanctuary, or the Koi nursery, or take a drive down to the Everglades. I grew up surrounded by swampy, tropical naturescapes which I find alluring and definitely influence my own personal aesthetic.

What was the first thing you ever designed?

I played Neopets a lot when I was a little kid, and there is this beauty contest on the site where you can redraw your Neopet and upload the design to get voted on by the community. I drew this terrifying cat/tiger/person thing on a pirated copy of Photoshop using my mouse. My claim to fame is that I actually got second place with that drawing.

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

Having a design career in the first place. It’s easy to forget how lucky I am to even be working in a creative field. I was always told that I couldn’t pursue a career in design. I was told that it was just a hobby or that I was too poor to consider design school or that the industry is too competitive to even try. To exist as a designer is to defy a social construct and that’s something we should all feel proud of.

What is something that your team does differently than other teams you’ve worked on?

I think what’s great about Instacart is its onboarding — every new hire gets to shop on the Instacart platform during their first week. As designers, we don’t just think about our users in the abstract — we get in their shoes and try to problem solve from their perspective.

Come build with Genesis.

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.