Bradlee is a queer graphic designer and illustrator who works as a Senior Designer on REI Co-op's brand team. As well as a 2019 WWU Design BFA alumni!
Working as a Senior Designer at REI, my day to day can look very different depending on the time of the year but is pretty typical to working in-house anywhere - except they let you leave early if it's sunny out. I am the only designer on a lot of our work pertaining to our membership program. REI is famously a Co-op so members are the core of our company and recently I had the opportunity to rebrand that entire program that has been slowly trickling out into the real world since earlier this year. Which involved creating new program brand guidelines, and implementing that brand system across email, in-store marketing, social channels, our website, direct mail and many other channels.
Rebranding our membership program was something that was really exciting to be a part of but I have been at REI for about 5 years now and had a lot of favorite projects. We have a branch of our business that works with local communities that put on a lot of really cool and unique experiences that I had the chance to work on like a local Atlanta music festival/outdoor-fest called Westside Outside that I got to illustrate and brand and the Denver Colfax Marathon back in 2023 was super cool. Oh I also did a product capsule collection for Pride in 2024 which was sick.
Honestly not really and that's pretty intentional. After work I LOVE to not work haha. That said, I do work with local Seattle drag queens to help them out with event posters or even drag merch for Seattle queens. I had this friend who I put on local parties in Seattle with called, HYPER, that was about creating these really fun queer hyperpop spaces but since Charli XCX blew up it seemed like our job was finished there so we sunset that for now. I used to make these stupid irreverent videos for that and some fun wild posters that were BEFORE ai so don't come for me saying that look like AI. That's classic photoshop kiddos!
I mean... interesting? I luckily graduated in the summer of 2019 and secured a job at REI before the pandemic but girlie it was crazy as hell working through that. Moving from working in the office everyday to a fully remote position in 2020 was challenging but like from a boring technology level and like work-life balance. I think a lot of us experienced that work-life balance and lack of separation though once we started taking meetings in our beds and what not. Within my 5 years at REI, I have seen a lot of business change and turnover both at REI and in the outdoor industry, and currently with this new T****p administration access to the outdoors is feeling more dire than ever. So I mean some advice, that I am currently not following, is always keep a strong and curated archive of your work just in case you need to update your portfolio with all the work you've been doing lately just in case everything changes and crashes overnight and you need a new job :P
THE PEOPLE! My 2019 BFA cohort are some of my best friends and I miss how much I used to see them and the time we spent working on things together in the same space. I still see them but people move, and life gets busy but whenever I wanna get wistful I put on some 2019 specific music and think about how much fun I had with my girlies in college.
Some advice is just try to make your work visible. It's not always easy to find a job at a place that values or wants to incorporate illustration so you may need to seek that out separately. Which can lead you into curating a little collection or show of sorts for your personal work OR you could just start posting about your illustrations of things you're interested in and try to carve out a little niche for yourself. For example, I've always loved drag so I would just illustrate queens at local shows after they did some insane number which led to them commissioning work from me. And just posting work in a certain style can lead to people in your DMs looking for something that specific style. So... find your niche and you've found a little market for yourself.
Okay this is my favorite question to ask at a party when things get boring. Okay I don't know if this is a secret or just a hot take but: Imposter syndrome never goes away. You just learn how to quiet the voices and live with it and anyone who says that it goes away with time is lying to you.
