Meet Fanny Nordmark

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Fanny Nordmark a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Fanny, so great to have you on the platform and excited to have you share your wisdom with our community today. Communication skills often play a powerful role in our ability to be effective and so we’d love to hear about how you developed your communication skills.

All of my life I have been interested in how to best make the people around me thrive. As a team leader, especially in a creative field, it is especially important to communicate both with your coworkers, superiors and clients in a way that makes each person feel heard, important and as if they are essential to the positive outcome of any project. When I was a student at Hyper Island in Karlskrona, Sweden, this was they key skill we were taught. Even though it is a design school, collaborating and communicating were the most important topics in each project we worked on. By learning how to alter communication styles based on personalities of who your are speaking to, and by always taking your own ego out of the equation, I learned how to both be a better leader, and how to better communicate to clients in a spirit of collaboration rather than a ego-led singular focused way.

Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?

I work as design director at the design studio Hugo & Marie in New York. I’ve been working with digital design, specifically UX/UI, web and app design since graduating from Hyper Island 13 years ago. My role is a mix between hands on design (which I still love) and overseeing talented designers and art directors on my team. I love the way we get to work with founder led brands who provide exciting products to better represent their company ethos and mission through visual design, branding, websites and campaign shoots. What I love most about our work is the collaborative aspect between members on the team and between us and our clients as well. Recently, I attended an event hosted by atmos.earth, one of our longest standing clients for climate week in Brooklyn – I love when my work also aligns with my personal interests and I get to really make a difference for folks who have an important story to tell.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

I would say that humility, curiosity and consistency are all traits that are key to who I am as a person and why I get to do the things I do every day. In an industry that often times feels very ego-oriented, staying humble and learning from others will not only make your day to day working life more enjoyable, but it will also allow you to keep evolving in your skills. Curiosity is something that I think all creative people inherently share, and is something that is important to constantly nurture to avoid falling out of love with your job. Trying new things that might not be related to what you do, but are still creative helps keep that interest and joy of creating alive. Consistency is a non-glamorous part of the creative process but extremely important. Very few, if any, people at all are talented enough to be able to maintain a career in the creative field without a consistent effort in getting better and refining your craft. I find that creating personal projects for yourself and really sticking to a schedule, even for hobbies help in pushing through when you feel the urge to procrastinate.

To close, maybe we can chat about your parents and what they did that was particularly impactful for you?

I come from a very academic family where traditional education was very important. When I decided to instead follow the path of going to a vocational digital design school my parents were extremely supportive and interested in what I was doing and what I was creating. Showing interest for something they knew very little about gave me the confidence to keep going. This also goes for when I decided to move across the world to pursue my career.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.fannynordmark.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fannynordmark/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fannynordmark

Image Credits

Hugo & Marie