JAMES: Welcome to Happy Paths, where we unpack the human stories behind some of the most used, most influential, and most famous software from the internet era. I'm James Evans. I'm the CEO of CommandBar, and the host of Happy Paths.


Every software company needs to announce its new features, and some of us pay more attention to these announcements than others. Sometimes, we'll reflexively close out of that little modal that pops up when we log into an app for the first time in a while. But, sometimes, a feature announcement catches our attention, and it's often because of a well-designed graphic. 


Today, we're going to dwell on these images and look at how they could have subtle, sometimes unintended implications beyond just the specific feature and product they showcase. They can tell a story and can even shape our perception of what's normal and what's not. 


This is a big topic, but it's one that Diógenes Brito has some first-hand knowledge about, literally. Currently, he's the Head of Product and Design at Air. But he's also well-known for his work as a product designer at Slack, where he added a brown skin tone to one of the company's biggest product feature rollouts at the time. I talked with Diógenes (Dió for short) to learn more about that decision, how it was received, and unpack how it's influenced product marketing since. 


If you work in tech and don't live within the shadow of the eye of Microsoft, your daily driver is probably Slack. But Slack's popularity has grown to surpass tech. The investment firm where I started my career coordinates take privates on Slack. It's so popular that it's kind of crazy to think that when Dió joined in 2014, the company was still tiny.


DIÓGENES: It was about 35 people, I believe. I was the third designer at the company, the first one in San Francisco. The other two were contractors. Some went full-time in Vancouver. The San Francisco office was newer and tended to be the headquarters, but there was still a strong contingent in Vancouver as well. So there was a bit of like a, I don't know, a new office culture happening in San Francisco. You could sort of see why this particular group of people would have decided to make something like Slack. Not that anyone was unfriendly, only that it was a very quiet office by default. [laughs]


JAMES: Let's do a bit of Slack history. What we know is Slack started as Tiny Speck, a company co-founded by Stewart Butterfield in 2009. At this point, Stewart was a known commodity as he had co-founded the massively popular photo-sharing website Flickr just a few years earlier. In 2011, Stewart and the Tiny Speck crew released something else, a browser-based multiplayer online role-playing game known as Glitch.


And Slack, the product as we know it emerged from Glitch, the game. It actually started as an internal tool that the Glitch/Tiny Speck team built and then realized could be bigger than the thing they were building. If you look hard enough, you can see some traces of Glitch still in Slack today: the Glitch crab, the piggy, the dusty stick. They're all hanging out in the custom section of the emoji picker.


DIÓGENES: And it was their internal communication tool built on top of IRC, so they decided to make that into their product. And I joined, I think, six months after the initial preview release of that tool. So it was fairly small. It was fairly new and just really kind of starting to get exciting, I think, not necessarily widely adopted just yet. 


Early on, we actually had quite a bit of pickup in tech teams and newsrooms. And so I think the fact that the tech press was an early adopter made it seem like there was much more adoption than there was because they were talking about this hot, new tool when it was really, like, mainly that population that was using it. So we definitely seemed popular early on, you know, within months of that release because [chuckles] a lot of the tech press was actually using Slack to communicate. It was really well suited for their particular use case.


JAMES: And Slack pivot was so epic that it's now used as shorthand for situations in which companies turn an internal tool side quest into their main quest. This is actually what happened with my company, Command Bar. I remember when we were fundraising and describing our origin story to someone we were pitching; they made a comment that was something like, "Oh, so you're trying to be the next Slack." And I was super confused because Slack had nothing to do with our product. But then I realized he was just talking about the pivot aspect.


DIÓGENES: Having worked in some other startups and also helped advise some early-stage companies, Slack was a good deal less frantic. They just, you know, had a really good sense generally, like, a good product sense was kind of pervasive across the company. So while there were weird, strange architectural decisions and bugs to keep track of throughout Slack's history, I think it's a lot less than the typical startup. So it never felt like, oh God, we're barely keeping up, and the service is constantly going down. It never quite felt like that. 


And while the final product vision wasn't necessarily super clear right when I joined, there was such a strong culture and, I guess, mission that it was almost as if that stuff was already defined. I mean, we had to do a lot of work, obviously, over time to iterate on product principles, and a master plan, and product strategy. But there was a lot to work with early on, which I really liked.


JAMES: Slack might have started a bit slow in those early days, but they quickly gained the interest of companies beyond tech and the newsroom. In late 2014, Slack became a unicorn valued at $1.1 billion. And they were adding $1 million in annual recurring revenue every month, at that point, the fastest-growing SaaS company ever. And in 2015, Fortune claimed Slack was adding 10,000 new daily active users each week. Those are video game numbers. So now it's 2015, and Slack was churning out new stuff. I'll let Dió set the scene.


DIÓGENES: I was working on the platform team at Slack. So I was doing a lot of design work around the API, and developer experience, and different ways that developers can build tools, or tooling, or Slack bots on top of our APIs. And we were releasing an add to Slack button, which was basically a shortcut that you could put on your website to get to your installation page or right into the OAuth flow so that you could install these Slack apps.


We were low on design resources. It wasn't like you design your, you know, you did your product design and then handed it off to another team that would do all of the design assets for marketing or any of that. We had to do some end-to-end design on that. So I had to do, like, a blog post image and some Twitter imagery to go along with the Slack button design itself. And so that's why I ended up making some of that, you know, the Twitter image and the blog post header. That's why it felt to me to go along with that. 


JAMES: Of all the stuff Slack was building, this wasn't the most revolutionary thing. Third-party plugins were and still are important to Slack's growth and a big differentiator against email. So making it super easy to adopt them was very much in Slack's best interest. But the interesting thing about this story isn't really the feature; it's the humans behind it. 


So Slack is low on design resources, and like any well-functioning startup, people put their hand up to help out with work that's not squarely in their lane. In Diógenes' case, it meant working on the marketing imagery for this launch. It wasn't like he was some SaaS product marketing guru, though.


DIÓGENES: I wouldn't necessarily call myself an expert by any means. I was definitely embedded in the zeitgeist; I would say, of technology and technology news. And I was paying attention, but I wasn't necessarily, since I wasn't a comms designer, like, all about paying attention to ads, and product marketing, and all that stuff. It was more that I had to work on it because we were a small team. And I had some, you know, examples to pull from memory and stuff. 


But part of the reason that after I helped to generate that imagery and sent it off to, like, be posted and used for the blog and that stuff, part of the reason I wrote a blog post afterwards was because the process of making that actually surprised me in terms of what I ended up thinking about or worrying about.


JAMES: Like I said earlier, product imagery can have unintended implications beyond just the brand itself. We'll link to Dió's blog post in the show notes, which really spells this out well. But let's dive a little deeper into his thought process.


DIÓGENES: I wouldn't have said I never saw darker skin tones or any kind of black imagery before then, but I can't actually recall any specific instances either. When I was making it myself, it stood out as unusual to me. And I was like, that's kind of upsetting that it is and that, yeah, there's a sense of what the default like, quote, unquote, "flesh-colored skin tone" is, and it's definitely white. And then not just making it myself but also pulling other designers in to help and thinking about what that felt like was sort of why I wrote that blog post about the imagery afterward.


After the imagery went out, as part of the launch of the feature, there was a lot of response to not just the feature itself but what that imagery looked like. It was clear to me that I wasn't the only one that noticed it as something unusual in the industry. It was kind of like, all right, I'm going to make this. Here's what I'm considering, you know, the add to Slack button as just a white button. And so I need some sort of frame around it, something kind of interesting. 


And my thought process was like, ooh, we're blessing these folks with this add to Slack button, you know, it's kind of coming down from the heavens. I remember that as part of either a previous project or something, he was playing around with another designer...Matt Hodgins had made a hand, you know, sort of illustrated it from scratch. And I was like, oh, I'll just use that, you know, because we have, like, a few days to get this imagery together. 


You know, I whipped up a little cloud and sunburst, no problem, and I'm going to use his hand. But, actually, talking about naming your layers, the setup in that file for the hand was like, I just could not understand the interaction between the color and the highlight and the shadow to just change the color to be a darker one. You know, I had to ask him to do it for speed because I knew he knew his file and could do it quickly. 


But it was sort of in that process that I began to think about, okay, am I making a thing about it? Is this extra effort? And now I have to do this extra work to talk to him, and get him to do it, and explain it, and why. And is he going to have a problem with it? Because, like, he made it first, and, you know, he made it the color of his hand. And that annoyance around first thinking about that, and then the idea that I thought about it in the first place, and that, you know, I was sort of several layers deep. 


In the end, the beauty about the people at Slack and what it was like working at Slack is that no one really cared or thought anything was weird about it, or the idea that people like me have, like, these extra thoughts, these extra considerations. There's a bit of an extra tax and emotional energy because of the, you know, what we usually see what's out there. 


And it's a small moment, all things considered, but it's reflective of a very common type of moment that happens, I think, when you are in, you know, one of an underrepresented minority in a culture that mostly doesn't look like you, or, you know, as is the case in American western society where media is not typically reflective, I mean, more so now than it was back then, but of, you know, a diverse array of viewpoints and creatives working on it. 


So that, you know, it was just something that was remarkable to me, and then all these layers of thinking about why it was remarkable and that I was annoyed that it was remarkable, and all those several layers deep. And stuff like that has come up many, many times in my career, thinking about how to share this additional burden that people of color might have in a context where they have to kind of communicate cross-culturally, or where most people are different from them.


JAMES: What I love about this story is that it showcases just how much individuals can make, quote, unquote, "company decisions" when companies are small. If you're used to working within big companies and navigating bureaucracy, it might surprise you that an idea like Dió's could come from one person and then just happen. And then these individual decisions get magnified because they're made with leverage. Because often, the audience size to company size ratio is incredibly large. In Slack's case, who knows how many people saw the blog post, the tweet promoting it, et cetera? And the general consensus was that what Dió did was pretty cool.


DIÓGENES: You know, as soon as it is out, maybe within minutes, less than that, and they noticed it immediately. People noticed that. They appreciated that it was brown. They assumed it was me that did it, [laughs] you know, the one brown designer. You know, it's remarkable that it was remarkable, again. And then it wasn't just internally at Slack. A bunch of external folks also noticed it. You know, they weren't the only ones who realized that this was kind of an unusual thing. And it's sort of, like, so unusual that you couldn't just do it and not be remarked upon, you know, it was, like, oh, a big deal. 


This popular-ish, well-known-ish or, I don't know, maybe up and coming, at that time, company released this graphic, and it looks like this, which is interesting to think about how these little decisions can make a difference because they kind of enter the brain of the general public, and that kind of matters.


JAMES: It definitely matters, and, in this case, it mattered a lot. The skin tone change on a hand in a product image might seem like a tiny detail, especially now that we've all probably seen multitoned emojis. But like Dió said, it's important that, as tool builders, we represent the audience of our tools. And the simplest, maybe the only way to make this happen is to have a team that reflects your audience. Dió's experience is probably the most literal example of this I've ever encountered. The man literally looked down at his hand, and that gave him the inspiration to make the hand he was drawing look like his. 


I thought about this in a personal context when building Command Bar. We're building tools to make other software products better, which means that our users are internet users broadly. So we have both a responsibility and, frankly, a profit motive to make sure our team is a representative cross-section of that audience along as many dimensions as possible. As Dió discussed, product imagery does more than show what your product is and how nice it looks. It also communicates who should use it or who you're designing for. There are so many subtle opportunities to make statements like this.


DIÓGENES: Or even Lin-Manuel Miranda's decision to, like, basically not cast any White people in the first cast of Hamilton for the most part, just by the ethnicities of the actual people there, which is interesting because that stuff happens in reverse all the time. But it's remarkable because it's unusual. And so whenever something is a little bit uncommon, you kind of think, wait, why is it that way? And that's another thing that has happened many times in my career.


You realize that there's, like, a standard operating procedure or a best practice that's really just a thing people do that no one has thought about recently, and they just keep doing because that's what it's been like before. You know, I've been on many, many design crits where a reason for a design decision is X company did it. And you can see how these decisions propagate with little to no effort because it feels safe to do what has come before. And conversely, it feels slightly less safe to do something new and different, for whatever reason. So it was kind of a combination of all those things.


JAMES: What Dió talks about here with the skin tone in this product image for Slack didn't happen in a vacuum. It was a sign of a bigger change across the industry.


JENNIFER DANIEL: The introduction of skin tone modifiers was justified as a way to, quote, "reflect more human diversity." Unlike text or photos, then, their sole intended purpose is to aid in the expression of one's skin color.


JAMES: That's Jennifer Daniel, the Emoji Subcommittee Chair for the Unicode Consortium.


JENNIFER DANIEL: This was a necessity largely due to Apple's early design decisions that radically changed the trajectory for Unicode and emoji. 


JAMES: Just a year earlier, in 2014, Unicode proposed skin tone modifier for emoji. Once that was adopted in early 2015, Apple rolled out an iOS update allowing you to change the skin tone for some emoji. Later that year, Diógenes designed that add to Slack graphic.


DIÓGENES: But I think there's something about that idea that most of the decision-making power is concentrated. And, you know, tech is a small place, and you hear about all the same things. And the blog post specifically got...I think it got retweeted by Medium, and they have several million followers. So then it kind of got several million views on its own. 


You know, it was sort of in the air, to begin with. And I think when it's in the air, that's obvious to me in that people immediately responded noticing it, and thinking about it, and appreciating it. And seeing someone actually do it kind of is a bit of some implicit permission, at least, to keep going. And, you know, you see a positive response, and you're saying, oh, people like that. This is a good thing. Maybe I can do that in my project. I have this opportunity, you know; maybe I should seize it instead of let it pass by. 


And I think around that same time, you had a lot of similar opportunities that people didn't pass by. And, you know, around the same time, like, Facebook is thinking about reworking their icons to be more inclusive. And you notice that the, like, the marketing imagery and some of the new products coming out starts to be more diverse. And I think every little decision that other people see about taking the opportunity to not go with the apparent default gives people a little bit more flexibility and leeway to do the same.


JAMES: This type of conscious design choice is something that the entire creative industry has grappled with for years; take media, for example.


DIÓGENES: Because I was in, like, a Fast Company article as a result of this blog post, essentially, I was invited to one of their conferences. And there I was...I can't remember the name of the institution, actually. But there was this...someone was speaking at that conference at Fast Company, that Fast Co conference about this foundation that does research on just, like, characters in media, just going through and being, like, this is how many male characters, and this is how many Hispanic, and Brown, and just that research in order to kind of talk about the influence that a small group of, like, writers, and creatives, and producers have over what millions of people might see.


JAMES: He's talking about the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media. Here is Geena talking about this with Prerna Gupta from Fast Company.


GEENA DAVIS: That's when I decided that I wanted to get the data. That's what really changed everything was, seeing how nobody seemed conscious of this phenomenon. And, if I got the data, I could go back to these creators and say, "I didn't think you were aware, but what do you think now?"


DIÓGENES: She was using that information to kind of push this idea that, hey, you have a lot of power. And if you just make that choice to change the gender of this character in the TV show, that makes a huge difference for the people who, you know, the kids who are watching it. That's, like, huge leverage over a society, basically. Then more people can feel included or see themselves represented. And that makes a difference over the long run. So I know that I helped to contribute, you know, in some small way to help other people feel okay making that same choice, I think, or at least noticing it and not letting it pass by.


JAMES: Maybe we need a similar type of foundation for tech and design to quantify this kind of data and representation in product imagery. There's a free idea for a fun weekend project involving some new image classification APIs. 


Here, Dió brings up the topic of leverage, which I mentioned before, and it's been kind of an unintentional theme on this podcast. Usually, you might think of just making a product image or some other asset for a marketing campaign as a pretty mundane task. And, in a way, this was a mundane task. But with Slack's rapidly growing user base, that meant this one product image generated a lot of impressions. And ironically, his decision, which led to the post going somewhat viral, made the product announcement one of the most viewed in Slack's early history. 


And for Dió, it was an opportunity to pull back and see that one small design change ended up speaking to entire groups of underrepresented people in the industry. But I did wonder whether the impact would have been so large if Dió hadn't written a blog post about it, chronicling his internal monologue before, during, and after the post.


DIÓGENES: Other people noticed it and were kind of thinking along the same lines. But to be able to package it up and share it with other people who might not have been there or might not have fully understood why it felt the way it felt, that was really, really useful. 


Honestly, the thing that I'm most proud of is that at least five different times, people of color who joined Slack came up to me and told me that, "I started looking at Slack because I read that article. I saw that, and this is why I got interested in Slack." It was like a huge sort of recruiting tool, which is an interesting way that what's true about your culture at your company can get spread [laughs] by way of individual members there. I'm most proud of that. 


That led to increase diversity at Slack because it became clear that we were one of the companies that was, like, a little better about supporting someone who was from an underrepresented background at Slack. I think the population of makers has become more diverse. But the things that we are creating they don't reflect the diverse population that might be using them or consuming them, even given that additionally diverse population. 


That's one thing I love about being a designer; you have a huge amount of effect on the people you're designing for, which is part of the reason we need a lot of, I think, more design ethics training. But, yeah, it's just an awesome responsibility and an important thing to consider when you make the decision to become a maker and create things that will change other people's behavior or media that other people will consume, even if it is just your job.


JAMES: As we wrap up, I want to leave you with these final words from Dió from 2016 AIGA Design Conference, where he talks about design as a service.


DIÓGENES BRITO: I was going to end it there, but one last thing: Creation is not neutral. By putting something out into the world, you're changing it for other people. The things that we make have an effect on other people's behavior. They change the world as it exists.


That was Diógenes Brito, who is currently the Head of Product and Design at Air in Brooklyn, New York. 


Thank you for listening to Happy Paths. For more information about the show, visit us at commandbar.com/happypaths. Or, you can send us a Tweet at @CommandBar. 


This podcast is executive produced by Maurice Cherry, with engineering and editing from Mandy Moore. 


Special thanks to Diógenes Brito and, of course, the entire team at Command Bar. I'm James Evans, and this is Happy Paths. See you next time.