Design with business impact
"Design doesn't really drive us." The person saying this, though it may come as a surprise, is Emil Iosipescu, Design lead at Soluble. But Emil, who joined the team almost two years ago, is clear about it: "what drives us first are brands, delivering value where the business needs it, and design is a means to achieve that, like technology is." With strategy as their guide and impact as their goal, his team creates visual universes and digital products that aren't mere window dressing—though they're beautiful too—but solve the problems of brands that want to endure. Today he tells us how they pull it off.
Q. What's the key for design—visual or product—to have business impact?
I'd say strategy. At Soluble it's everything in how we work. Every project we take on in Design has to have a framework behind it—theoretical and conceptual—that lets us make many decisions beyond just visual aspects. Plus, we work through these strategic decisions as a collective, with all of Soluble's areas participating. Brand, user experience, and business impact are one whole made up of many elements.
Q. You talk about keeping strategy front and center. How do you do that?
Our way of working with the brand platform lets us stay very aligned with our client's business objectives and positioning. And once we have that strategic foundation, that's when we start operating across different design phases—but always from that holistic vision.
Q. Visual and functional—how do they relate in Design?
The split between visual and functional is increasingly outdated. What matters is solving problems holistically. More and more designers are doing an MBA to understand business because it's fundamental to have that vision of context, needs, objectives, the product's role—with the brand always present. And mediating throughout, to deliver the best user experience while satisfying business needs.
Q. "My website doesn't tell the story of who we are as a brand". How do you approach a problem like this?
It's not something you tackle from Design alone, but from the different teams that make up Soluble. First, to tell a story you need to be very clear about what you are and the value you can bring to your audience. That's where strategy is critical. Then we start generating storytelling and visual and interaction components come in, user experience, content… The process is collaborative—it's not that someone shows up and says "we need to tell these stories", then another person decides typography and colors, another handles interaction and another brings the technology. It's a process we do together so there's consistency in the user experience when we lay out the brand narrative.
Q. Another of the most common concerns is the need for a rebranding…
A rebranding isn't just a visual change—that's a consequence. You have to revisit the foundations or it becomes a cosmetic fix and won't generate the impact we're looking for.
From the strategic platform we look for a creative concept that lets us take flight, orchestrating it with visual resources that have to do with typography, color, morphologies, photography, illustrations… to generate a visual system. Our designers have a lot of context so they can make the best decisions, because the focus at Soluble isn't just the visual, but solving problems and generating impact with everything we do.
Q. Brand and product—how do they feed each other?
This is a very particular view, but I think that in a digital product and in a digital brand, brand is product and product is brand. There's no one without the other. I understand brands as experiences and products are experiences—they're the same thing.
In fact, in many cases the product itself is the brand. Think for example of Spotify. The brand is the tangible expression of the experience the product generates. After ten years it's not even a product anymore, it's this concept of ubiquity—it's not an app or a website. You listen to your music on your phone, your computer or your car, and you have the exact song at the same second where you left off listening. It's already something ethereal, an experience.
Q. As a design leader, do you think Soluble has its own visual style?
I think at Soluble we don't have a style or aesthetic that we apply to projects. We're actually chameleonic in adapting to brands, and that's what drives us. Delivering value where the client needs it and making strategic decisions is what moves us. Design isn't what drives us—we see it as a medium we care deeply about and where we always pursue excellence, knowing that aesthetics won't force any decision.
After studying graphic design, Emil's career took flight with product design. For him, the keys to a digital product are: business, planning, and agility. In recent months, working with clients from very different sectors has given him "a master's in entrepreneurs, in what they need." And that's where he focuses every design decision.
Q. And you—what drives you, what motivates you at work?
I love designing, but as I grow as a professional, the impact my work generates fills me more. What's interesting about working at Soluble is that you're constantly operating across different sectors, in different business contexts, and you learn so much. Because of how it was founded and its clients, it's given me a master's in entrepreneurs, in what they need.
Q. Entrepreneurs with a digital product—how would you recommend they start?
If a brand wants to focus on launching a product, what I'd do is launch the smallest possible product, but one that breathes the brand as well as it can. It's better to start that way, without losing sight of the brand vision behind it, rather than launching a big, generic product and iterating from there.
Q. Movement, or even volatility, seems to be the only constant these days…
Yes, digital products are in constant motion and in many cases even at a business level, shifting their fit to market. That's why it's so important to start small and iterate, understand the product, and be able to redesign it according to new needs. This has been how we work at Soluble from the beginning.
Now Artificial Intelligence is unlocking many new possibilities. It's possible that the more operational tasks will become automated, not just at a linguistic level like with ChatGPT, but also visually, generating images, and very soon in digital product, with the development of AI-driven interfaces. But I do think that strategic decision-making at the core will remain human, so that artificial intelligence can then help us with all the more operational aspects.
Q. What trend is catching your attention?
I'm very interested in the trend of moving from MVP (minimum viable product) to MVB, minimum viable branding, where all the decisions we make today, which until now have been understood as fixed and rigid, will become agile. I think there's ground to cover there because perhaps there are many companies in the digital sector that are in a changing or evolving fit to market, moving constantly, and they need brands behind them that can follow these shifts.
Q. It's an interesting landscape, but also challenging. Do you remember any professional advice you've been given that still helps you today?
The best advice I ever received had nothing to do with design itself, but it hit me in my first week of work. I was 20 years old, it was 2008, and I'd just started at a digital publisher. The thing is, there was an email where they were talking about me—saying good things—but this person then forwarded it to me and said: "look, here at this company every time someone talks about a person, that person finds out." And it was something that got me thinking and that led me to conduct myself the way I do. I try to have open and constructive conversations, keep the professional part separate, have context, and learn from others.
Q. What advice would you give to someone just starting their career?
Don't follow methods. Now that everything is so standardized, especially in product, don't ride so hard on the trends of absolute truths. There are plenty of interesting things, but I think everyone has to learn to think critically to solve problems and not in the way the methods say you should do it.
Q. Speaking of starting a career, what did you want to be as a kid?
I wanted to be an architect from a very young age. The shape of spaces fascinated me. I'd go to a house and ask them to show me all of it and I loved seeing it and thinking about how it feels. My father did advertising his whole life, but he shared an office with an architect who's really crack in Argentina, so I'd go see him and talking with him inspired me a ton. He gave me a little book by Le Corbusier, 'Message to Architecture Students', and what I liked most was that he defined architecture as the "machine for living". Shift your thinking, focus on the user and how that user lives in the space.
Q. That has a lot to do with what you do now, swapping physical space for digital.
It's true, it's not very different. Plus, I really love industrial design. I think the ten components that Dieter Rams named for good industrial product design back in the sixties is today digital product design, but identical. I'm also inspired by Gehry's deconstructivism and his idea that to be able to break design and deconstruct it, you first have to master it, be a great builder, as technical as possible.
Oh, I also would've liked to be a footballer, but well…
Q. We can't finish without asking you, Emil, what are success and happiness for you?
Success for me is achieving impact on a client or project, whether it's adding a tiny button to an email or creating a mega design where I love the visual part. Creating impact, whether it's for a small business selling shoes or a mega corporation.
And happiness, I don't know, I'm still searching for it, I love looking for it. But I don't have the formula. I'd say it's micromoments.
One of them has definitely been this little chat with Emil. Soon we'll tell you more about the impact they achieve in Design, building, as Le Corbusier would say, those machines for digital brands to live in.
