Lotte Peters

My name is Lotte, Lotte Peters. I am in Amsterdam in the Netherlands and I am a brand designer.

I think as a designer it's such a wonderful job. What I love is creating things, playing every day, but also making the world a little bit more beautiful.

And I know that sounds very dreamy but it's so nice to be with people that have that urge to create and make new things and challenge yourself to make beautiful things every day, but also things that people interact with every day.

Sometimes I make things and there's like hundreds or thousands of people who use what I've made, and that idea is so much fun that I never feel like I'm actually working. That's something I can highly recommend to everyone.

What a brand designer does is what we do is we basically create the look and feel for a brand. So that's anything from like a logo, the colours, the typography, photography style, but also how a brand behaves.

So for instance, if you go on a website of this brand or look at an app or look at a video or social media, how you interact with that brand, and what it sounds like.

What a typical day looks like for me, that varies a lot. And that's also what it makes it a lot of fun.

I work for a lot of different companies, so very often my day starts with a stand-up and that means that I meet with my team, and it's either online or in the office, and we talk about what we're gonna do that day.

And for me that often means that I can be sketching or designing, or I can look for inspiration, or I can give a presentation to a client. A lot of different things.

How I work with other people? That's often online because I work often with people that are not in the same city or often not even in the same country.

So we have calls online where we either have a presentation with each other but sometimes we're also on a call for an hour and we just talk about an idea and how we want to execute the design.

And sometimes we meet in person and those are often creative sessions. So we come in the same room and we want to solve a creative problem. We bring snacks, we have a big board where we write all our ideas and often there's also a big screen. So if we want to show designs to each other we show it on the big screen and we have a conversation about how we can improve things.

Absolute best thing about my job is I get to play every day.

So I can play with colour, I can play with fonts, I can play with logo design, I can play with different types of photos. I can basically start a day with an empty screen or an empty piece of paper and at the end of the day, I make something. And that's something I love to do.

And another thing that I love is because I work for a lot of different products or different companies, I get to learn a lot of different things. So for instance, I can work for a car brand or car company for a couple of months. I talk a lot with the people who work at the company. So I learn a lot of things about cars. I know a lot of things about cars, even though I don't work for a car company, I know a lot of things about it.

And a few months later I might work for a hospital and then I know a lot about hospitals or months later I work for a fashion brand and I learn a lot about fashion. So you get to learn a lot of different things from the people you work with.

I think the worst thing is that people are remote, or at least in my job people are remote, so I don't see them very often. Sometimes I work with teams with people that I've never met in person before and that's a bit of a shame.

I always loved the playing I was talking about. That's something I've always enjoyed as a kid, like working with colouring or painting or ceramics, making things when I was little. I still love doing it today and it felt like a very natural choice. That's why I chose this.

I got to be a brand designer and my journey was that at the end of high school, we had to make a decision what kind of college or university we would go to. And because I love creating things, I wanted to have a look at all the different art schools. And I chose one of those art schools and I chose the course called graphic design.

And I did that for four years. So I got my bachelor degree and after school I went straight to work. I got a job as a graphic designer. And I worked as a graphic designer for seven or eight years and then I went back to school.

People always think that you can only go to school when you're very young but it's also fun if you're a bit older and then go back and learn new things.

I went to school to learn more about digital design. So the web, website, apps, like the online experiences.

My school? What helped the most was when I was in a class with a lot of people who like the same thing and we learned from each other.

So it's a lot of fun when you love something and often in high school you're the only person, or maybe there are one or two others that are like that too.

But when you go to school specifically for that one thing that you like, there are a lot of people you can talk to and a lot of people you can learn from, which is very great.

I think the most memorable moments, I would always think that's like the end result or an award you win or something very beautiful that you've made.

But the most memorable moments is definitely with the team or the people that I've worked with. So it's either we've been working very hard for something and afterwards we would go for dinner and we had a lot of fun together, or we had to travel for work and got to know each other a lot better.

So it's more the people that I've worked with that are the most, most memorable.

I wish I'd made more mistakes. I think that's my biggest mistake. I was always very careful and wanted to be good and make things good, but it also means you don't get to explore and play as much as you would like.

So I think my biggest mistake is to try to not make mistakes. Make as many mistakes as you can because that's the only way you can learn and become better.

And another advice I would give is to be less focused on the end result and more on taking the time to learn new things and make it good instead of trying to rush it and do it as fast as possible.