Hi, I’m Dylan Greif — I design across product, editorial, and brand. I’m inspired by the idea that design is only as good as the company it helps you keep, the places it helps you find, and the person it helps you be. It drives my professional work, personal explorations, and teaching. Full bio→
Dylan Greif runs his own design studio, dylbop — spanning product, editorial, brand, and experiential. Before that, he led product design at Merit America. He was the Head of User Experience at Bloomberg News and Global Creative Director at Bloomberg Quicktake (now Bloomberg Originals), where his work was featured in Designboom. He innovated storytelling formats at the Guardian Innovation Lab where his team won the Online News Association’s Gannett Foundation Award for Technical Innovation, and at Atavist where his design relaunch was featured in Fast Company. He designed for growth at Etsy and Casper. And, his work with Local Projects was exhibited at The Guggenheim Museum as part of the bmw Guggenheim Lab. He has taught design at The Rhode Island School of Design, The New School, and the School of Visual Arts.
Dylan received an mfa in graphic design from risd, and a ba in English and Government from Cornell. He has spoken and given workshops at The New York Times, aiga/ny, The Guardian Lab’s “Spurring a New Wave of Mobile Innovation in News,” Havas Media, The NewCo Festival, Etsy’s “Guest Designer” series, risd, UPenn, and Kutztown University. On the side, he teaches pizza and pasta classes at Ciao Evento and runs a small-scale challah delivery service. He grew up in Dobbs Ferry, ny, in the Hudson Valley.
Dylan is nyc-based and operates onsite and remote. If you’d like to chat, reach out at dylan@dylangreif.com
Bloomberg Quicktake had grown across Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, TV, streaming apps, and Bloomberg.com without a coherent brand. Viewers couldn't identify our network in passing. And, without a design system driven by editorial needs and user insights, our content got lost in a fast-paced, oversaturated media landscape. Meanwhile, our global teams struggled to produce packages at the speed of news. As global creative director, I led the design of a brand and visual system to meet these challenges. I also spearheaded its rollout across our teams and platforms. The vision: an identity that isn't static, but is recognized by the way it moves and adapts to different contexts — less a broadcaster a viewer turns on or off, and more a companion that follows them through the day. Designing the graphic and motion identity at once, we created an abstractable logomark — a line and a circle, shapes drawn from the original Bloomberg logo — that forms a title-case Q that moves to express three values. Quicktake is global — with "windows" and "portals" that convey a worldwide lens; it's data-driven — with "processing" movements and a palette built on light; and, it's human — with "organic" movements and cool dark backdrops that let the warm faces on screen shine.
Podcast listeners are usually told at the very end of an episode to go find a URL for "bonus material." What if the material came to them instead — guided, in the moment, as they listened? As the product designer, I helped the team conceive a chat-based player where the podcast host messaged listeners with images, links, and context in time with the audio. Years before conversational interfaces became the center of product design, Strange Bird was an experiment in a more organic, high-touch kind of guidance: a host accompanying you through the content rather than tossing links over a wall and hoping you find them.
Daily commuters spend too much time during their commute browsing a sea of content for good articles to read. What if they could be delivered a package of articles they'd enjoy, perfectly timed for their commute? As the product designer, I helped the team conceive a personalized, self-learning news reader for daily commuters, including a "Log" feature to help users understand how we were using the data we collected about them.
Casper wanted to give its on-the-floor sales associates a PoS app to help make customers' discovery and purchase experience friendly and efficient. To customers, when and how items are delivered is essential (i.e. by or on X date via UPS/white-glove/pick-up, etc.). However, these details vary with the delivery location, the stock, and the product in question; they also affect the price total. As the product design lead, my challenge was to design a UX that allows a sales associate to quickly access, share, and process this info with customers at whatever stage. Additionally, it was to direct designer Anne Lee in the visual design. These mockups reflect our work prior to later user-testing, and revision for launch.
Funded by philanthropic grants, author Paul Tough wanted to make his latest research not just a commercial product, but a free and public resource for the education community. As the designer, I conceived its design across different formats to make it as accessible as possible, as well as for each format to make it as impactful as possible. I also did the direction for the book's cover design by Chelsea Cardinal.
The original version had many powerful features, but the IA and interface was not organized around meaningful workflows, and there was friction navigating across different parts of a project, making it hard to perform simple actions. The redesign aimed to give the user a more focused experience around meaningful tasks at hand. It also offered more componentized layout features for a more flexible and enjoyable story-building experience. As head of design, I did the UX, UI, and visual design. I worked most closely with Thomas Rhiel, front-end developer and head of reader experience, on the modular components, and with Jeff Sisson, senior developer, on just about everything.
The previous visual identity was a bootstrap skin over input fields with a hairline logotype that disappeared at small scales. We wanted writers to feel comfortable actively creating stories in a digital space, as opposed to methodically inputting pre-written content. I took inspiration from graphic designer Karel Martens, whose traditional letterpress work evokes surprise, creativity, and delight. The logotype is a typewriter face and the logo-mark is a paperclip bent in the shape of an “A”.
Etsy’s early growth was impressively organic: people spread the word. The international growth team hypothesized that a seller and buyer referrals program could multiply its impact. My challenges as the team's designer included: creating a coherent user journey across diverse touch points on and off site; communicating a monetary incentive without overshadowing the original community value; clear messaging at checkout around the terms of using referral credits.
As a global marketplace, Etsy celebrates that a person in one country can purchase handcrafted and vintage items unique to another country. Shops created in different languages poses a barrier to that cross-cultural exchange. On the international growth team, I helped design, optimize, and test shop translation tools to help sellers reach a wider, international audience. I spoke about my work and ethnographic research at an AIGA/NY talk.
From the press release: Moses’ tablets. Neanderthal cave paintings. Gutenberg’s Bible. AIM. The Instant Message is the greatest record of the modern human voice. Before texting and friending and tweeting, it defined our digital adolescence. It is for this reason and more that we believe these little conversations were meant to be performed — as plays. Join us for a reading of your bravest, brashest, funniest, darkest, and most embarrassingest Instant Message and G-Chat moments :)
From the abstract: In The Element of Style, Strunk and White’s first principle of writing is “Choose from a suitable design.” A suitable design should correspond to the contemporary patterns of communication technology engages us in. My work entails the design of new writing frameworks that are informed by such patterns, exploring: 1) meta data tracking to support visual and multi-layered analyses, 2) social interaction as a framework for creative collaboration, and 3) experience design to rethink how literature is valued in diverse contexts. All offer new design frameworks from which writers can choose that seek to transfer the values of the old into the new.
Why is it that so many of the graphic designers I have met were English majors? Dinah, Adam, and I (English majors) started a publication that celebrated both disciplines’ shared devotion to language and meaning. Each week, we chose a one-word prompt to inspire the graphic design of a literary moment on a broadsheet newspaper.
Craig Mod is a writer and designer and leading thinker in the digital shifts of publishing, writing, and reading. I interviewed him over text message, where his replies had to be 1) written by hand on whatever physical material he had around him at the moment, 2) photographed and sent back via text within 20 minutes of my asking. We did it for a week, with an exchange about every day. It was a fun experiment in how the context of time and surroundings can be its own medium for communication.
The web encourages non-linear reading behavior. The traditional book, by virtue of its physical construction, does not. As an experiment and challenge, I explored what kind of physical book construction might make non-linear reading easy. I published an anthology of three design essays as a book. I identified common themes, used color to label themes across pages, and devised a page-cascading, double-sided book-binding to make the colored labels on every page always visible and accessible at once.
Phone Talks is an opportunity to revitalize the underused public space of Pawtucket’s Main Street plaza through personal and collective narrative. We collected audio accounts of Pawtucket residents sharing their stories about the plaza, rewired a payphone to play those stories upon ringing, and installed the phone in the plaza where passersby could pick-up, listen, and call in with stories of their own.
Using Max/msp and gps, we customized a program that mapped a pop song to each block of downtown Providence. Participants composed a unique mash-up based on their path, which they listened to on headphones. We made a CD and a map for each mashup, so others could re-enact participants’ “audiomented” experiences.
Passers-by were invited to enter a large red box. The interior was designed as a quaint, closet-apartment where an old tape-radio played a foreign radio station and gold wallpaper and postcards covered the walls. The visitor was greeted by a stranger welcoming them to their scheduled portrait session. After the session, the visitor wrote down a memory on a piece of tape. The exhibit explored how people happened to portray themselves, intentionally and unintentionally, when displaced away from their familiar context and into a foreign environment.
We installed a blue, dining room table in Central Park, Washington Square Park, Union Square, and Bryant Park. At each table setting was an open journal, where passers-by could write personal entries and read other people’s. We collected a few hundred entries from a diverse community of people sharing their love, fears, confessions, confusions, and simple depictions of the moment.