Alberto Calvo

Work & Co

Product Designer based in Madrid with a passion of learning how things work. He likes to make clean, thoroughly thought and organized stuff.

What led you into design?

I always liked to organize stuff in order to make things more efficient for me. Also got a heavy influence from my mother, who is always doing something creative in her spare time.

It was around 2000 when I started playing around with my Windows setup to make it look nicer, making wallpapers and these kinds of things. I borrowed an old PowerMac G4 from work, and that was a game changer for me. I entered MacThemes forum and there I met some of the best designers I know to date. We were young, and almost none of us was designing for a living back then, but nowadays you can see these people working on some of the biggest companies in the world. I got very lucky to be a part of that. It was the spark that led me to move to Madrid to study design and look for career opportunities as a UI Designer.

What does a typical day look like?

My life has changed a bit in the last months since I’ve been working 100% remotely at Sketch and now I go to an office again most of the days.

I usually wake up at 6:30, leave my son at the nursery and start working around 9. Right now we are in the very early stages of a project, so lots of meetings and discussions are required in order to prepare a plan. I focus more on decision making the days I’m at the office, and I do more production/investigation-related stuff the days I work from home. I’m usually done around 18:00. Then I go enjoy some time with my family.

What’s your setup?

I got the top-of-the-line 27” iMac last year with a custom matte black painted Magic Keyboard and a Logitech MX Master 2S, as I can’t stand Apple mice. I recently completed my home office setup with a pair of AudioEngine A2+ speakers.

My home desk is an electrical Bekant one from Ikea, so I can work standing a bit every day, plus a black Embody chair from Herman Miller, which was an amazing investment, as I spent sitting there countless hours. My back is grateful for that.

At the office, I have a 13” MacBook Pro and a 27” LG Ultrafine display. Coincidentally, we have the same desks at Cabify but in white, so my keyboard and mouse are white there to match.

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This is a macbook and other utilities

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Where do you go to get inspired?

It depends. If it’s just for visual stuff I go to places like Dribbble, Typewolf or Designspiration. Also, I get lots of visual inspiration from Twitter.

But aside from that, I think inspiration comes from elsewhere: movies, music or any kind of basic real life stuff, like the shower.

What product have you recently seen that made you think this is great design?

I’ve been really impressed with Are.na lately. It’s a bookmarking and curation platform that is really geared towards research. You could kind of compare it to Pinterest, but where you can connect a pin to multiple boards and whole boards to other boards. I’ve been getting really bored with the amount of ads and bad content I was getting served by Pinterest’s algorithms so when I came across Are.na it felt very fresh to me. The whole product feels extremely minimal and considered, which is something I appreciate a lot.

What pieces of work are you most proud of?

In the last two years at Work & Co, I've worked on a variety of projects—there are two in particular that have launched I wanted to highlight.

One of the first projects I worked on at Work & Co was the mobile app for Virgin America. It’s such a complicated product and it was incredibly tough to make it as simple as we did. The team on it, especially Joe Stewart who lead the design, really kicked my butt when it came to paying attention to details and I think I’m a better designer for it. It's also a project that was built 100% by Work & Co, which is super important to ensuring all those fussy details make it into market. Props to our engineering and QA teams for pulling it off.

The other project I want to highlight was the mobile app for Marriott which we worked on early in 2016. It was very indicative of our process at Work & Co where we had a focused amount of time concepting, prototyping, and testing ideas. Some of them are far out and crazy, which is how we pushed for a new navigation for Marriott's app. Because the app automatically adjusts based on context—say you're planning a trip or you're checked in to a stay—we opted not to have a traditional home screen or navigation. Instead, you land on the most relevant section and can cycle through the rest using a single button. It's hard to describe (which is why we prototype), but once used in context it is really intuitive and ownable for Marriott. I don't think we'd have arrived at a solution like that without trying out so many other concepts first.

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What design challenges do you face at your company?

Personally, I think the further you get in your career, the more second-nature the actual design work becomes. Obviously, I am still striving to create great work every day, but the process of getting results stays more or less the same. The things I’m more concerned about now than before are trying to figure out how to be most helpful to the people around me, be it giving feedback or trying to expose them to ideas that could lead them to new solutions.

I’m also working on becoming a better communicator every day. I find that being better at listening and reading people’s intentions is the best way to get to the right solution, but it’s probably the hardest part of the job. It also takes time, which is tough for an impatient person like myself.

Anything you want to promote or plug?

Hit me up on Twitter if you wanna chat about design, fashion, life or anything else!