Day In The CX Life With Laura Shrago, Graphic Designer At The Financial Times

Welcome back to A Day In The CX Life With CCW Digital, a series where we take a look into the people, technology, tools and trends that drive the customer contact industry. In this series we ask employees just like you to share how they spend their workday–from wake-up routines to meetings and what’s on their dinner plate for the evening.

In this daily log we meet Laura Shrago, a graphic designer at the Financial Times. If you like to stay on the up-and-up regarding all things fiscal then there's a very likely chance you've come across Shrago's design work, and if you haven't you can check out her portfolio here. Over the years she has worked with brands customers know and love like KIND protein bars and Dolan medical scrubs. But today, she draws us a picture of what her standard Thursday is like at FT. 

Name: Laura Shrago

Occupation/Company: Graphic Designer, Financial Times

Industry: Design, Media/Publishing

Age: 26

Location: Brooklyn

Years At Role: 2.5

Daily Tasks: Design organic social media posts, paid social media campaigns, email templates, and ad hoc marketing collateral (postcards, webcast ads). Basically I make anything that entices audiences to click on our links and drive up readership!

Professional Goals: I’d love to be a graphic designer in an industry that combines interior design and/or art direction with my role!

Personal Hobbies: Home decorating/improvement projects, card games, art museums.

THURSDAY

7:00 am: I wake up, shower, and start getting ready for the day. Even on days I’m working from home, I still like to put on a decent outfit and makeup so it feels like I’m dressed for a day of work. I generally prefer working in the office because of the separation from the leisure parts of my life, so I try to simulate that boundary even when I’m working from home.

8:00 am I eat breakfast while my cat, Perchik sits with me. I feed him and give him his morning medication. After that I give him lots of treats and attention so he can’t stay mad at me for giving him the meds.

Shrago's cat, Perchik.

8:20 am: I leave my apartment in Crown Heights and commute about 40 minutes to my office in Hudson Square (a “new” neighborhood they’re trying to make a thing…really it’s Soho).

I pass the time listening to music or reading. I usually have something on the docket to read online that has been recommended to me. This morning it was a Slate article from my mom, fact-checking the movie Killers of the Flower Moon. (Spoiler: it’s pretty accurate.)

9:00 am: I arrive at work and settle into my setup, located with the rest of the marketing team. I have a special mug for my desk at work that my coworker gifted me, so I grab that and make myself a cup of tea and take a short walk around the office to say good morning to my friends.

9:15 am: Requests start flowing in for organic social media post graphics. The marketers on my team plan their posts for the day, so they send me requests to build out the visual component to get people scrolling on social media to click on our articles.

I design these based on an elaborate set of templates I’ve built for each of our 10 publications, and I get anywhere from three to 10 of these requests each morning.

10:00 am: I have a 1:1 check-in with the Marketing Design Manager. We go over priorities for the week, review and critique drafts of projects before sending them to the rest of the team, and catch up on whatever else is happening in our lives. She works remotely so this is a video chat, so her dog is usually also on this call.

11:00 am: I grab a snack and dive into whatever major project is a top priority for the day. Today, it’s a project for our Sponsored Content team. I’m formatting three transcripts from a recent webcast series hosted by one of our publications, Financial Advisor IQ, and sponsored by Commonwealth.

This design has a cover page with an overview of the webcast series, and several subsequent two-column pages with the dialogue from the webcasts, with accompanying graphics and quotes.

Building these transcripts is sort of a puzzle; I need to make sure all the pull quotes fall near the in-context quote in the transcript copy, plus key words can’t be broken up on separate lines or columns.

I also have to eliminate any "orphans," which is when the last line of a paragraph is a single word. This requires playing around with the typography spacing and making sure when I make an adjustment to address one issue, I’m not creating another somewhere else.

12:00 pm: I break for lunch and take a walk with some friends to pick up food in the neighborhood. I almost always bring leftovers I cooked for dinner the night before, but I like to join them for a walk anyway to get some fresh air. We go back to the office and eat in our favorite spot, a little cubby with booth seating, and we catch up for about an hour.

1:00 pm: Early afternoon is a good time for me to make a push with any major projects that have an EOD deadline. I like to aim for about 3 pm to send off projects to the requester. It gives me a good chunk of the day to make progress while still allowing me to come back with a fresh eye after lunch for edits, and then I can send it off to the requester with a decent amount of time for them to review or at least peek at it before the end of the day.

2:10 pm: I head over to our biweekly team meeting. We start with an icebreaker to get everyone talking and build rapport among the team, and then we dive into territory updates. Today we each shared which unsolved mystery we wished we had the answer to. (Mine is the Vermeer art heist from the 90s at the Gardner Museum in Boston, which is down the street from my old apartment.)

Since our company runs 10 publications, our marketing team is divided into territories based on publication topic and audience. Each territory has two marketers each, so in these meetings they take turns providing updates on campaign initiatives for their publications.

Design goes last, since the breadth of our work spans all territories. This is a great time to hear about how my designs are affecting post or ad engagement and driving readers to our content. We close off the meeting with questions for the team and shoutouts.

3:00 pm: I start to hit my afternoon slump. I make myself another cup of tea, and if she’s not busy, go say hi to my friend who is a reporter.

Her deadline is early afternoon, so it’s better to pop over after her stories have been sent to her editor. I like seeing what she’s working on, because sometimes I’m making ads for articles she’s written! It’s nice to connect with the people who create the products we’re marketing.

3:15 pm: From now until the end of the day is a great period of uninterrupted focus time. This is a good time to make edits on open projects I’ve received feedback on, or otherwise get things to a good stopping place for the end of the day.

5:00 pm: I finish work and take a few minutes to clean up everything at my desk before commuting home.

5:45 pm: I watch an episode of TV as a mental break, usually a sitcom, and cuddle with my cat. 

Shrago and Perchik cuddling on the couch.

6:15 pm: I start to prepare dinner and snack on olives while I’m cooking to hold me over. Every Sunday I plan out what meals I’m going to eat on which days, which eliminates the mental effort of coming up with something to cook when I get done with work.

I actually have a lot of fun strategizing combinations of ingredients to create a variety of meals with similar ingredients, and it saves me money on groceries while still having freshly cooked dinners each night. Tonight, it's mushroom and barley soup on the menu!

7:00: I eat dinner at the dining room table so that I don’t feel like I’m spending all my at-home downtime on my couch. Perchik usually sits in another dining room chair to keep me company, sometimes in the chair directly across from me like we’re on a date! 

8:00 pm: I watch a movie, TV, or some kind of informational YouTube video (I love music history and analysis videos) while I drink my post-dinner cup of tea. Depending on my mood, I also play Solitaire at the same time.

8:30 pm: I give Perchik his nighttime meds, which again comes with many treats for him. I usually also have some kind of dessert around this time, like fruit or chocolate. 

10:00 pm: I start getting ready for bed, and if I’m in the middle of a book, read for a bit. I also do my daily Yiddish lesson on Duolingo, since by this point the owl mascot is sending me mean notifications because the day’s almost over and I still haven’t practiced.

Occasionally, I journal if there’s something on my mind, so that I can get it out on paper rather than stew about it in bed. Perchik comes and joins me, and after walking in circles for a few minutes, finds a good spot, and then we can both go to sleep.

Photos courtesy of Laura Shrago.