Creating Realized turned out to be a wonderful adventure both professionally and personally.
We (my partners and me) created a small community of designers who applied strategic design, created easy-to-use, beautiful, and cost-effective solutions and services. Oh, one more thing... We always, always, always designed putting users at the center.
After five years we were acquired by Sngular now we led the Sngular Design Team.
- 2013 to Dec. 2018
- Realized.es
- My Story:
- Built company from scratch, recruiting and supervising a team of 10. Secured clients, creating proposals, delivering innovative solutions, create a healthy design culture, you name it...
- Clients:
- Santander, BBVA, Axa, IKEA, Codorníu, Amnesty International. Collaborated with leading Design Studios: FJORD/Accenture, Tecnilogica, Ilios.org
- My partners in crime:
- Sarah Rink and David Álvarez
Research is non-negotiable! With this claim, we design digital products and services inside Realized. As part of our services, we also offered our clients training on design processes so the design practice was an integral part of their internal routines.
We strongly believed in the power of design, that's why we organized ourselves around clear principles:
It's about people, not technology
Research is non-negotiable
Hire us to make the company more profitable... and more beautiful
Design is arguments and evidence
Behind all these examples is a complete user-centric based design process
Business inside, the role of service design is vital. At Realized we designed solutions that understood as a whole the experiences that happen front of and backstage the user. Observation from the client's side, finding space for improvement brought our clients' products and services to another level.
At Realized never subscribe to the design stream that prioritizes the complete elimination of deliveries and documents. We understood the importance of the artifacts generated during the different phases of a project when communicating and convincing stakeholders. Design artifacts must be designed too!
We helped to offer a 360' view of the experience to make better business decisions
The greatest challenge was creating a profitable company. We were a distributed team of ten designers with different but complementary skills.
As the founder, my internal focus was to help designers develop their professional careers and skills and yet, generate and common Studio identity that will be the reflection of the communal culture acquire through the design practice. Excellence as a result of the design process, team ceremonies, and rituals.
Realized had offices in Madrid and Barcelona and its goal and focus were working with large national and international clients.
Our value proposition was especially well accepted at large e-commerce clients, banking, and insurance companies. The connection with our clients turned out to be sharing the vision of design as "the strategy".
A design study oriented to scale through Design Systems
My experience with Design Systems started at this time inside Realized. Initially, through different customer projects, I change and evolve my vision at the interface to the componentization and systematization of our solutions. Seeing the depth of this new approach, we reoriented the entire company towards experimentation and knowledge of Design Systems. Creating for this purpose our internal system: Thonet.realized.es, it is still alive if you are curious about it :)
