About Nina Hadfield — Art Director and Senior Brand Designer

I always knew I would do something visual. I drew, sculpted, sewed, built things, took things apart and put them back together

But I think I was even more interested in understanding how things worked. Why one object feels whole while another seems to fall apart into pieces. How light changes form. What makes a material expressive

I certainly didn’t think of it as any kind of approach at the time. I was simply interested in looking a little longer than necessary

Largely because of my grandfather. He noticed quite early that it was becoming more than a childhood hobby, took it seriously before anyone else did, and insisted that I apply

He was always repairing something, inventing something, adapting things, altering theatre costumes. I spent a lot of time nearby, watching him work

It seems that way 🙂

The ability to see relationships between things. Proportion, light, volume, composition. And patience

One of my teachers used to say, “Here we train the hand and teach the eye — not the other way around”

The older I get, the more precise that sentence feels

I’d be careful with superpowers 😄

Experience does let you notice a problem very quickly. But I still need to be able to explain why I see it and why I’m proposing a particular solution. Otherwise professional judgment slips very easily into personal preference — and from there into pure subjectivity

I wouldn’t really say I moved from art into design. It was more that another coordinate system gradually appeared alongside art — another layer

In design, form alone was no longer enough. There was a person it was being created for, a task, an environment, production, constraints — and the question of what would happen to the solution after the designer had finished working on it

Yes. I completed a Bachelor’s degree in Art & Design at HSE University. Before that I’d also had a more technical period of study, so artistic and engineering ways of looking at a problem started sitting alongside each other quite naturally

Very. Academic drawing and painting, typography, technical drawing, engineering graphics, photography, materials and packaging, marketing, CAD, 3D, art and design history

I was lucky in that respect. The artistic and technical sides of the work never really existed separately for me

It was an additional Programming & Design course. Nothing remotely deep enough for me to call myself a programmer — I only went far enough to understand the fundamentals

But that was exactly what I wanted: to understand the basic logic of code and how something I design eventually becomes a working product

I certainly hope not 😅

It’s usually much more interesting to understand why it can’t be done. Is it a technical constraint? The cost of implementation? Product architecture? Or is there another route that no one has considered yet?

When both sides understand at least the basic logic of how the other works, the quality of the conversation changes completely

Yes. Illustrations for children’s editorial material 🖍️

That too 😅

Once, while I was working in publishing, I sent a TIFF to print without flattening the layers. Elements that were never supposed to be there made it all the way into the printed piece

That was pretty much my reaction too 😬

After that, “attention to detail” stopped being a nice line to put on a CV. A design mistake can have very physical consequences: money, time, an entire print run that has to be redone, and problems created for everyone further down the line

Probably quite early 🙂

When you spend a long time inside one company, you get to see what decisions do over time. At launch, many things feel finished. A few years later, you can see which principles actually survive change — and which ones keep producing more and more exceptions

Since 2013. I joined as Lead Designer and later became Art Director

Being able to observe the same system over many years has had a huge influence on how I think about design now

Scale 📐

New products, markets, interfaces, channels and teams appear. At some point, one person simply cannot control every decision

And then “What should this look like?” becomes less interesting than “How do different people make good decisions within the same underlying logic?”

Among other things. I’ve been working with components and design systems for years

But a component library doesn’t automatically create a coherent system. If the underlying logic is weak, components simply help reproduce that weakness faster

I do love design systems. I just don’t think they have magical powers ✨

And a very useful one

I built a programme for students with almost no design background. I quickly realised how many things professionals stop noticing simply because those things have become obvious to them

If a rule only makes sense after you’ve spent several years sitting next to its author, then it probably still lives in the author’s head

Exactly. To me, they’re different parts of the same problem: how to make professional knowledge explicit and transferable, so it doesn’t remain trapped inside one person’s experience

It actually wasn’t sudden at all 🙂

I needed to design exhibition spaces and understand the space and the future construction before anything was built. Then came modelling, sculpting, characters, animation and digital environments

At some point, a professional tool also became part of my art practice

Yes. Although art never really disappeared — the tools just kept changing 🎨

3D gave me a way back into form, material and space, but inside a digital environment

It matters a great deal to me. But I don’t like using art as proof that it somehow makes me better at commercial design

The connection is simpler: art keeps my visual field from shrinking to the boundaries of a single profession

In the way I look at a problem

I’ve never seen those fields as a collection of separate professions to accumulate. A new tool usually appeared when the previous one was no longer enough to understand or realise the task

So the centre for me isn’t the medium. It’s the ability to see the relationships between form, function, technology, and what happens to a solution after it leaves my hands

Usually the ones that no longer fit inside a single deliverable

When a company has several products or brands. When product and marketing gradually drift into different visual worlds. When a design system already exists, but every new case creates another exception. When different teams make perfectly reasonable decisions that no longer add up to one coherent whole

And especially when another redesign looks like the obvious answer, but the real cause seems to sit somewhere deeper

Exactly. Sometimes the design itself is doing its job perfectly well

But the company has changed: new products, new teams, new markets, new technologies. Old rules are still being used in an environment they were never designed for

At that point, adding another visual layer may only increase the complexity

These days, yes 🙂

The term itself is fairly recent for me. The problems it describes are much older

I needed a way to talk about brand, product, interfaces, communication and design systems as connected parts of the same environment — together with documentation and the logic behind how decisions get made

No. A design system can be part of Visual Infrastructure. It isn’t the whole infrastructure

At some point, I noticed a recurring logic in the way I was already working and decided to articulate it

Decode, Distill, Structure, Codify, Enable, Evolve

They aren’t six mandatory steps. In practice, stages can overlap, run in parallel, or send you back to an earlier one. Some projects simply don’t need all six

The METHOD gives me a working structure for analysing a problem. The actual route is shaped by the problem itself and by the context of the project

It changes a great deal on the production side

Generating options, prototypes, images and copy is becoming faster. But production speed doesn’t answer which option is right — or why

That makes judgment even more valuable: the ability to choose, test and explain a decision, and to understand its consequences

That moment when a problem that looked tangled at the beginning starts to become clear

When separate observations begin forming a structure and you can finally see what actually needs to change — and what is better left alone

Probably curiosity 🧐. That’s the one thing that has barely changed

Then they should definitely open the CV 👀