Birthday Week 2024: Behind-the-scenes with Design

Hello everyone and welcome to this week in net.

It's the October 4th 2024 edition and this week we're going to go behind the scenes on our main innovation week birthday week that happened last week.

We're making a double episode of Behind the Scenes to discuss the artistic part of making visuals for birthday week and also about the logistics part of birthday week.

We start with the art.

With us, we have Carolinder, one of our artists and principal visual communications design lead.

Carrying along with Gil Lazard did many great designs for all of our blogs throughout birthday week.

Hello, Carrie. Are you?

I'm doing Well, how are you doing?

I'm good.

Here from the Lisbon office.

For those who don't know, where are you based?

I'm based in San Francisco.

So time in Lisbon and I am anxious to see the new office.

It looks gorgeous.

True. You you already were it wasn't you were here for a while.

Last year, right?

Mm hmm. So this is a segment about our main innovation week birthday week and You do a very relevant part of that week, which is the art.

Let's call like that.

It is art. You're quite the artist.

But for those who don't know what does Carrie Linder for several years now, do you at Calvary?

What has been your evolution in the Greek?

Currently, we run visual comms.

So a lot of the diagrams and illustrations that sort of help explain how Cloudflare works.

So when it comes to birthday week, that means we do all of the illustrations, the header illustrations for the blog posts, supporting illustrations and the diagrams that explain, you know, how these products work and why they're relevant to sort of the consumers that are reading the posts.

But we have worked on a million projects around Cloudflare, one .one .one .one .one .one .one .the mobile app version of that radar, those were all things that we were sort of the initial design team on.

And I'm only half the team, Guilla who's based out of Lisbon is the other half of the team.

So we are small, but we like to think that we're pretty mighty.

You are definitely are and you're your work touches a lot of parts of Caulffler and externally too.

For this birthday week 2024, what would you say were the main challenges of trying to give some visual perspective of the many announcements and blog posts that we had?

Well, I think the announcements this week were just so varied across the spectrum of what CloudFlare does, that it wasn't like, you know, developer week when we're focusing in on a specific subset of CloudFlare's offerings.

We often have a lot of visual theming that goes throughout the week.

So for our developer products, we like to talk in terms of legos and sort of building these worlds and giving folks the tools to create and build on Cloudflare Developer Platform.

And when it comes to birthday week, we have folks contributing from every corner of the company.

So we have policy focused announcements.

We have developer focused announcements.

We've got performance focused announcements.

And so finding that sort of visual unity is always a little bit more challenging when you're so far across the Cloudflare spectrum.

Thanks, everyone. that was the developer day.

So that was like, they in the sense, but yeah, that lead different aspects.

AI also, how do we try to make some visuals about AI robots potentially, but.

So the visual metaphor we use when we're talking about AI, I came up with with the team out of a, you know, a long sort of brainstorming session, but we like to think of it as sort of a crystal ball where you're asking questions, you're getting informed answers through this thing that feels a little bit magical.

So when it comes to our radar platform, we now have a text explorer so that you can ask questions in plain English and it pulls up a radar dashboard that has all of the relevant information.

And it feels a little bit magical, but it is hopefully in a way that is easy for folks to interact with.

You don't have to necessarily dig deep in all of our special tools and and levers that we can pull to, you know, pull that information.

It's just right at your fingertips and that should hopefully feel like asking a question to a crystal ball.

At least that's the visual metaphor we go.

You'll see a lot of crystal balls in our AI day.

It's true and to be honest, it's not only something that resonates makes sense.

It's quite a magical.

Actually magic is a word very much used for what the generative and these chatbots typically today do, but also other sorts of AI.

But actually, it's also a cool visual way to show something.

So, we can.

Can we show the product on to work on?

True true true.

Can you show us some of the visuals that we did for the week?

Oh, of course. Let me present my Figma file.

So this is the real Figma file that we collaborated on with all of the authors.

During the week, I have this birthday week overview and it starts out with a bunch of blank squares that represent all of the announcements.

And as we sit down and work with the authors and start pulling together these illustrations, one by one, those little blank squares fill in.

So anyone that needs to grab these illustrations, they can have them as they appear.

And this is where we I actually do all of the work.

So I have a very chaotic designer workspace here.

Please don't judge the chaos in this space.

But this is sort of where I compile all of the things that we're drawing inspiration from for our different launches.

And then we hold office hours with the authors.

So I'll sit down and usually Gijo will be there, too.

We'll bring in the authors and they'll take us through the blog, they'll sort of explain the announcement and the market that the announcement is, you know, is going to be sort of entering into and they'll take us through sort of the relevant technical details.

And what we'll do is we'll go through some of our other libraries and pull illustrations that touch on some of those same elements and you know diagrams as well.

And we'll pull in a bunch of sort of references and we'll chat with them about how we can take these elements from the references and combine them into something that represents this new announcement and that feels like it sort of encompasses everything that they want to talk about.

So you can see illustrations from a long time back.

This was a magical impression.

Illustrations have got this wizard and a clamp that I made for somebody who is the Well, Laura Rustin, who's wonderful.

But these things that you never think you're going to use a wizard and a clamp ever again.

And it turns out that we did, you know, we were talking about compression again in a different way.

And we pulled that clamp for this standard compression post.

But you can see sort of how these things evolve and where we were we pull the inspiration from that comes back to this birthday week over.

Yeah. There you have all of the days of the week where we had different images for each day different blog posts some are the header images, right?

Like those others are elements inside the blog post themselves Any story there's a bunch of pens there that was for the founders later, right on Sunday.

Yeah, yeah, so I love the founders letter, but it always covers a really broad.

You know, we're talking about how the world has changed in the last year since the founder sort of spoke directly to the people that are reading the blog.

And so it's it's always kind of a challenge to create something that you know has enough reverence for these sometimes very difficult topics that are being covered in the letter.

So last year I did a pen that looked sort of like this and This year I had sort of three tools and that represents the three original founders of CloudFlare.

But each individual tool is sort of important for a reason.

Sort of the way that I think about CloudFlare and the way that we interact with the worlds we have here drafting pencil for sort of the new ideas and the experimentation and it's got any race or you can You can change things quickly and you're sketching things out.

And then a pen for sort of realizing the vision.

It's a little bit, it's a fountain pen, so it's a little bit more sort of policy focused and formal and sort of realizing the vision of Cloudflare.

And then a red marker for redlining and reworking the faulty models that we find in the world.

We should never be afraid to change something just because it's been that way.

for a long time.

And a lot of the birthday week announcements focus on looking at these things that have become outdated.

We always say, you know, the internet wasn't built for what it has become.

And we have to have the courage to look at these things and change them even if it feels very audacious at club player.

And so that was sort of the reason behind those three tools.

And it's something that I don't know that anyone would really sit down and spend a lot of time with a header image and understand why that was the case.

But I'd like to have sort of a reason behind the illustrations as we're creating them so that, you know, if you're looking for deeper meaning, you will find it in a lot of these.

Makes sense. And that's quite interesting to get.

I didn't get initially. Yeah.

But two things that I think goes along what you said.

One is is those three things are different from each other.

They can try that like you were saying, that's interesting in general.

They look good. They are visually interesting.

So they are tools.

So all of those elements I felt, oh, this makes that this is interesting.

Even without knowing specifically about the founders, three founders, a relation, but it's quite interesting to see your talk there.

Thank you. Yeah. And, you know, when you look at these other ones there, we, we I hope that sort of, when you see it initially, that it feels relevant to the product, that it feels like it makes sense to accompany the blog post.

But then if you read the blog post and come back to the header image, you'll be able to find other elements.

So when we're talking about the AI contents scraping, we have all of these little literal crawlers and web crawlers.

and these vacuums that are sort of sucking up the content, sucking up the original content that folks have on their web pages to feed these AI models.

If you look closely, they've got, you know, the dials look like spiders, then they've got little sort of fangs down here and the web crawlers.

And we try to use those same visual metaphors when we're talking about web crawlers, not just on the blog, but, you know, everywhere that we're using, using that term, we try to use sort of consistent visual terminology in the same way that we use, you know, consistent verbal terminology.

So it's something that hopefully at first glance it works.

And then if you look for that deeper meaning, you will find it.

And we've got, you know, a little mini version of the of the content scraper down there too.

Makes sense.

And quite interesting. It's kind of cool, but also that deeper meaning is definitely interesting.

Yeah, yeah.

That's too big. Yeah, this is Tuesday.

So this is the safer resolver and a lot of this announcement was focused on families and creating an internet that is safe for all of the members of your home.

So we've got a family here and there are lots of little elements that we tried to add to make it feel like home.

I've got her little teddy bear and the cat that is, I imagine them sort of like watching Netflix at the cat is very interested in whatever's going on in that screen.

But sort of the shape of the illustration is intended to show sort of this bubble of security and safety that you have all of the elements of sort of the family unit that are contained within.

It's the light from the lamp, but we always like to use light as a metaphor for technology.

So you'll see that across all of our illustrations.

The light source is always very important and often the light comes from an element within the illustration itself.

It's not the sun lighting things from a distance.

So we've got sort of the lava lamp here, but the important one is this sort of tall, modern lamp that is casting the light that represents sort of the bubble of security that you can access when you're using these tools to make sure that your home internet is safe.

So people want like the live level.

Of course, but also the plans there are quite a good addition.

Thank you. Yeah, I can show you actually I've got all of these illustration elements that we put together.

So when we need a plan, we just go over here to little ever evolving garden and these are the ones that that I created for that illustration in particular but every time we create something new we try to take those elements and put them in the you know look at all of the Legos we've got we try to put them in this illustration assets folder so that when we're creating something new we can make sure that we're using consistent visuals across the across all of this sort of touch point.

So these are new plants, but we'll probably be seeing these plants again if you're looking closely at the blog.

I use those elements from the assets to help me with some images and they're a great.

Oh, good. Yeah. I'm happy that they're useful.

We want to make it as easy as possible for folks to put together visuals for their projects and contribute back into the visual language of Cloudflare.

often we are relying very heavily on the engineers and the PMs that are building these projects to tell us how they think of them visually and we want to bring the visuals as close as possible to the actual experts in these projects.

We we try to learn as much as we possibly can and we've got a pretty good general knowledge about how all of these individual aspects of the company work, but I am, you know, I'm not the best expert in DNS and I want to make sure that we've got our DNS expert that is able to sit down and help illustrate our DNS illustration so that it feels true to the way that the technology works and the way that folks are going to be interacting with the technology when they're implementing it.

Because what do you want to show us more?

So I mean, we can look at this one is speed brain.

This is sort of the next header illustration.

These are just the top line here is the featured post from the blog.

But I think it's another good illustration of the sort of light source philosophy that we think about where the technology and the thing that's changing is casting the light.

And sometimes that's very difficult when it's the central element that's casting the light, especially because if you look, all of these illustrations are on light or white backgrounds.

And so creating something that's casting light, usually that's gonna be the lightest element in your illustration normally.

But because we've got this style, we have to sort of create the shadows around the light source to make sure that that central element feels like it is sort of popping and shedding So this speed brain one was very difficult.

We've got some sort of Chrome -esque swirls in there, not so swirly that we would have any copyright issues, but you sort of have the brain sort of spinning in.

And this is a pretty big leap forward in terms of our ability to render web pages very, very quickly.

We've got a lot of diagrams about how this sort of speculation technology works.

But it was one that we've got a very evocative name, speed brain.

And I wasn't sure if we should just go with an actual brain here.

But I think we were able to come to a place where it felt like a very speedy brain in a way that, in a way that worked from an illustration perspective.

There's movement there.

There's, yeah, you have movement of speed in this whirling part.

Yeah, exactly. And we've got sort of the glowing fissures which makes it feel like the light is coming from within the brain.

And when I move my cursor around, you can see all of the different elements that I actually created this.

So many, quite incredible to see.

Yeah. You that I would always surprise on how many little elements one image is made of.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. And you know, sometimes it's a little bit more obvious when we've got something like this, that's like a compilation.

You can see all of the different things.

But I can take, actually, this is a great example.

Another example of the information of the technology is light.

This is Project Alexandria, which is our, we have Project Galileo, which helps provide cloud -flare services for free for significant journalistic and humanitarian organizations and we have the Athenian project which helps protect elections worldwide and now we have Project Alexandria which is preventing our services for free to young startups and so this is the lighthouse of Alexandria not the library of Alexandria that is important the library of Alexandria makes me very sad because there is so much you know information that was lost but But if you look at it and sort of ungroup it, there are so many different elements that, you know, each of these little rectangles and things that went into creating this lighthouse.

And hopefully it doesn't look, you know, too busy when it's all unclicked.

But we actually also have the Argo ship here.

So from our Argo products, that's a tiny little story again there.

Historically accurate these the triangle sales were actually not invented yet but I think it works for the illustration hopefully nobody calls me out on that.

It does it does work.

I don't think we'll have we have historians that will be too preoccupied about that.

Yeah, two are concerned about it.

The but that's a great one for sure.

Thank you. Yeah.

You mentioned diagrams, specifically, also a relevant part of the job in terms of making complex things appear.

Can you show us an idea?

Yeah, absolutely. So we were talking about the speed brain diagrams.

And I'll actually go into the office hours workspace, where you can see all of the different iterations that we went through before we were able to get this set of diagrams that hopefully is nice and easy to follow here.

This particular process is very complex.

We have sort of eight steps in the initial sort of rendering of the diagram.

And what I did was sat in with Alex Krivitt, who was sort of running the project from a blog perspective.

effective.

And we talked about each of the different steps that would be part of this handshake before we have speed brain enabled and after we have speed brain enabled to try to highlight those differences and what actually is changing when you have this product enabled.

But it's very difficult because not all of these things happen at the same time.

You have to sort of simplify and break things down into steps and hopefully when we came up with at the end here is easy enough to follow for someone who is not intimately familiar with the way that this technology works and also feels true to the way that it actually functions for someone who is you know deeply immersed in that world.

So we're always trying to translate for folks who are less It's technical and more technical, but it's difficult to make something that feels true and relevant to both of those groups.

That's always a tight group that we're walking.

I believe it's very clear visually that there are different steps and I bet that the need of summarize that is quite difficult in getting it right, but also understandable.

Yeah, it is.

And I got to make a fun little bird watching thing app is sort of what I was thinking of when I was putting together these different web pages.

And that goes right back into the diagram diagram library as soon as it's done.

But you can see, you know, just how crazy things get when we're, um, he's in the Figma file with me and we're sort of trying to figure these things out.

I believe we have, um, at one point he was very excited about using a, a Drake meme.

that he had Photoshop, JJ's face on, and I wanna make it clear that he did the Photoshop, being there, he did a great job, but that was the key was interested in doing, and we ended up using maybe a little bit more simplified visual in the end result there, but you can sort of see how these things come together at the end.

We tried to make things that are simplified and have a clear flow from left to right, and that are, easy enough for someone to to parse without really being so deep in the the text That resonates one question speaks specifically about that actually From the feedback you get made that being journal from blog authors or even external Is there feedback where folks even the ones that wrote the blog post feel that hey that really?

sums up what I did here in a very visual and short manner.

All the time and I think I personally feel like I often get too much credit because I'm relying so heavily on these authors to explain and verbalize the way that this technology works and it's not always very simple technology.

I'm leaning very heavily on their expertise and you know often they don't think about things visually, you know, just by default.

And I do think about things visually by default.

So it would be like them sort of taking notes on things and, you know, creating a paragraph about it.

That's how it feels for me to sort of work things out diagrammatically.

And, you know, sometimes I'll put something together and they'll be like, I don't know how it looks.

It could be, you know, just do never, I'll put something together in a little bit like, well, it's definitely not that.

So actually this should be here and actually this should be here and you just need a visual sort of base and then actually folks do have opinions actually we can build upon that, you know, we can move things around so that it feels true and relevant to the processes that are being expressed.

Makes sense.

I'm curious on, do you have a favor for the week?

A favor diagram?

Or a hero image?

Hmm. I don't know.

It's something that I think we need a little time often to see how things land and end up.

But I do really love Project Alexandria and just sort of the thinking behind that name as sort of this lighthouse.

You know, one of the wonders of the ancient world, and I, you know, the idea that there's this lighthouse in this port city that is a central hub of knowledge.

You have folks that are coming from all over the world, and they see this big lighthouse in this big beacon, and they know that they're going to be in a place that has the support to sort of further their pursuits, their academic pursuits.

it's going to sort of allow them to understand the world in a different way and affect the world in a different way.

I think that that naming is very meaningful to me.

And I tried to sort of express some of those elements visually when I was creating this project, Alexandria, header image.

And I do like the way that it turned out.

And I am a big fan of the project.

I think it's really meaningful.

And all of those impact projects are something that I really love and respect about Cloudflare.

So I'm excited that we get to add this one to our set.

It's a great one. And all of that history you mentioned, the knowledge part, it's internet, but it's an internet, a human internet.

So there's thoughts into things and that knowledge part of the history of humans is quite interesting.

Yeah, there are so many real people that are excited about this, that are feeling hope because of this.

And it's just lovely to be able to, you know, the whole theme of birthday because giving gifts back to the internet and taking these things that are part of cloud -class technology and trying to make them more generally available, more widely available to anyone that wants to use them.

And I think that this is sort of a perfect encapsulation of giving gifts back to the internet and doing it for free and not really asking for something in return for it.

But you get to meet all of these wonderful people with young companies that are going to change the world soon enough.

Last question for you.

Working for so many years at Fall Fair, different birthday weeks for sure, different projects.

What would be the something about fall flare and working in an artistic department at call flare, most folks don't know, but they should.

I think I get to work personally, sort of one -on -one with so many different folks in different corners of the company, and everybody when I interact with them, they know sort of a little piece of what our team You know, the order for the retreat seven years ago, or you were the one that created this icon for something.

And they get to see sort of little pieces of everything.

But it really, our scope is really, really broad.

And we have created, you know, we've done the design for products.

We've done the design for a lot of these things that started out very young and small that we had sort of a scrappy team for that have grown and blossomed into amazing parts of Cloudflares portfolio.

And I think one of my favorite things is that I get to work one -on -one with so many different people.

And I get to hear from the source exactly why they're excited about um, they're, you know, little piece of Cloudflare.

Um, and that gets me really excited about Cloudflare.

And I love how broad our scope is, um, you know, learning about folks from every different corner of the company.

So I think it's just the breadth that people wouldn't necessarily expect.

The visuals touch so many different parts of the company.

Um, and they're really important to the way that we tell our story.

So I, I love my job.

And I love the people that I get to work with.

It's quite amazing to see all of the things that you do and continue to do as culture.

It's quite amazing to see.

And to be honest, I remember when Claude won, started, it was a very small product.

And now it has millions and millions and millions of users.

Oh my gosh, yeah, blows my mind.

That's repeated in different products, different things.

throughout and I love when the company allows employees to do different things to work in different areas and you're definitely a reflection of that.

Yeah, thank you so much.

I'm happy that I have the role that I have and I love our little team.

Thank you for everything you do.

With Giltoo and that's a wrap.

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