Who are you?
Hi there Dribbble! My name is Zack Davenport and I’m a designer living and working in NYC. I’m a born-and-raised North Carolinian and went to the College of Design at NC State in Raleigh. My favorite things in the world are Eastern NC barbecue, sweet tea, and chicken biscuits. I moved up to NYC after college for a designer role at Foursquare where I worked for about two and a half years. At the start of this year I joined the small team at Vine where I’ve been focusing on a range of things from product design, marketing design, animation, iconography, and branding.
What are you working on?
This is kind of a hard question since I generally have three types of projects going on at the same time: work work, freelance work, and a personal project.
At Vine we recently launched a new product called Music on Vine which allows users to easily create perfectly looping audio. I worked on the onboarding animations, marketing, branding, and splash webpage for the launch. Our team had been working on this product for a little over a year, so it’s been so fun for us to see Viners using the tool to create awesome content.
Recently, outside of work, I’ve been working with with a startup in LA on a rebranding effort for the past several months.
And in terms of personal projects, I just recently got married a couple weeks ago and had the fun but extremely challenging task of branding the invitations, website, menu cards, etc. to fit me and my wife’s aesthetic. [Ed. Note: Congratulations Zack!!!]
It’s been a busy year!
Choose a favorite shot of yours. Why is it a favorite?
Back when I was working at Foursquare, I worked closely with the Brooklyn-based design firm Red Antler on the rebranding efforts of Foursquare and their new spinoff check-in app, Swarm. During the process I had the unique opportunity to work closely with the Swarm team on visual design within the app while simultaneously working with Red Antler on the app’s branding. This shot gives you an idea of how much work went into the rebranding effort. Over the course of a couple months, designer Mike McVicar and I explored over 160 bee forms before landing on the final form.
Tell us about your setup. What tools do you use in your job? (e.g. hardware, software, pens, paper, blowtorch)?
Well first and foremost, Illustrator is my first love. I learned Illustrator back in high school (taught by my dad) and feel the most comfortable in the program. Only recently after starting at Vine have I started using Sketch and After Effects on a daily basis.
I’m always carrying around my Moleskine and some sort of black pen. I try to stay away from pencils mainly because I try not to erase anything but also because I’m left-handed and the lead always leave my hands dirty after sketching.
At work I have a Thunderbolt Display and mouse which are helpful with programs like After Effects but outside of work I stick to my Macbook Air and trackpad. I live in a small studio so if I’m doing work from home, I’m usually jamming at a local coffeeshop.
Choose a favorite shot from another Player. Why do you dig it?
I have to go with a shot by Doublenaut. It’s too difficult to choose one though. When I first joined Dribbble I had just started college and was still developing my own personal design style. I stumbled onto Doublenaut’s work early on and was immediately drawn to everything about their work. Their corner treatments, textures, offset color ways, and compositions were everything I wanted in my own work.
This was way before Illustrator CS6 introduced its corner radius tool so most of the shapes in their compositions seemed impossible to create yet they made it look so easy. Everything about their work has such a nice, simple, flow to it and to this day I’m still trying to achieve a similar aesthetic.
Find Zack at Dribbble, on Twitter, and at www.mrdavenport.co.
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