Stampede Design
It has been almost 2 months since I joined Stampede as a Web Designer. I have never worked remotely before, hence this is a new experience to me with regards to managing myself without the presence of a supervisor physically to watch over me as well as the term itself.
On working remotely
Many people might think that it would be easy working from home – that you can lounge around where pants are optional and you can just work any time you want.
Little did they know that, remote working requires a lot of discipline. It’s all about managing yourself to work in a non-traditional office enviroment; no superior to physically guide you, no colleague to hover around your cubicle to chat around and have some water cooler talks. Like every other job, remote working requires trust and responsibility from both the employer and employee to work. There is the challenge, on top of my dream to be a brilliant designer.
Only upon a few days joining Stampede, it felt like a breeze. Not only that Stampede has a system to make sure that everyone could work remotely very easily and comfortably while keeping to the deadlines, even the water cooler chats over Skype made me feel like we all sit in one physical office throwing banters over one another.
Stampede’s working environment evolve around Skype, Basecamp, Toggl, Invision, Bonus.ly and other amazing apps that help the team with the daily task. The team work remotely within miles away including (but not limited to, I know some move around a lot) Langkawi, Kedah, Ipoh, Kuala Lumpur and Perlis with only Skype and a Whatsapp group connecting us. Whilst technology has done such a great job as the medium, once again it is all about trust, responsibility and dedication from each team member to make this all work.
On design
While I had been designing from the start, I came from from advertising and print design industry for a couple of years before. Suffice to say website design and development is something I had been out of touch with for a long time. My knowledge on web development technology is way outdated. Thankfully, everyone at Stampede, especially Shaza my direct mentor, has been really helpful in training me on top of enhancing my knowledge and skills in designing.
From design trainings conducted by Shaza, I am currently learning some the new design techniques as well as keeping up with the latest web design trend. Shaza also teaches me new things on better understanding website design from font
for websites, font icons, typography, whitespaces, the do & don’ts in website design and many more.
I was also given the responsibility to post daily on Stampede Curated. The task is a good practice for me to spot on good design and gain more knowledge from the design itself. By observation, it could inspire me to design by learning through other people’s design. The task also keeps me on the latest design trend as it rapidly evolves from time to time.
While working with Sani in his training, i learned a lot on website designing development. Among them are basic CSS, grid in designing website, Bootstrap and Javascript. This is when I realised designing website is a team effort. When
you embark on a web design, you have to think on the front end developer’s side too. When you design, you always have to imagine how the others will work with your design, what type of components you should design, what grid you’re
going to use and such. This to ensure the total work process will be done with as less hiccups as possible.
The team
I had the pleasure to meet and to get to know everyone for the first time last week over our picnic and island vacation. Amidst Shaiful’s smooth ukulele streaming and munching Dov’s brilliant lamb shashlik, we chatted for hours like old friends.
While it may had been only my first two months here, it is almost like I have known everybody for a long time before.
Stampede team members are always up to no good – every conversation is filled with funny remarks and sarcastic retorts of which some we have compiled over in a tumblr called Things Stampede Team Says.
Joining Stampede has been such an amazing experience so far. I look forward for more exciting years to come so I could craft more and more stellar design works for the company.
