I’m Maya Upaya, a creative director and brand designer from Brasília. I’ve led creative work since 2011: inside agencies, at UNAIDS, at an electric motorcycle company and in my own studio, Upaya.

I need to understand the product, the audience and what the design has to do. Most of the time that means asking who we’re really talking to.

At Origem, an electric motorcycle company, the brand spoke like Apple. The people riding the bikes were delivery workers. I talked to the riders, put the research, references and campaign ideas into one document and took it to the comms team and the CEO. The brand changed direction.

My rule: clear direction, trust their judgment, and take responsibility for final quality.

On Talk To Me Openly, a PAHO campaign in Portuguese, English and Spanish, the client picked one of my concepts. Another designer did the adaptations. I gave her the concept, the audience, the goals and the few things that couldn’t change. The rest was hers to solve.

When I ask for a change, I say why, and the why comes from the concept or the goal.

I like building things that keep working when I’m not in the room: brand guidelines, the editorial system behind 8 technical publications for WWF Brazil, editable templates that let a team keep posting without asking me for every piece.

A team needs a system too. At IBC I was one of about 4 designers, with no manager title. The project managers couldn’t see who was overloaded. I started posting a daily update on WhatsApp: what was on my plate, what came first, when I had room to help. Within about a week the other designers were doing the same.

At Idea Propaganda I was art director of a 12-person creative team. I hired, trained, handed out the work and reviewed it. Fast retail jobs for car dealerships went to the people who were quick and knew production. The university recruitment campaign went to the most conceptual designer. I checked print and TV deadlines with production before promising a date to a client.

At UNAIDS, from 2015 to 2018, I was lead campaign designer and creative director, taking campaigns from concept to production. One of them, Desafio UNAIDS, was a boxed game about HIV sent to 38 content creators. It reached 1.3 million organic views and was presented at AIDS 2018 in Amsterdam.

At Upaya I put a team together for each campaign. I work out how many designers it needs, who handles social, web, motion and illustration, and I coordinate them until it ships.