Inside Jobs: How Alice Lee Blends Art And Tech As An Illustrator At Dropbox

It might not seem like artistic pursuits have much of a place in multi-billion dollar software businesses. But as you can see in this week’s episode of Inside Jobs, creating art is a full-time job for Dropbox’s Alice Lee. As an illustrator and product designer, Lee spends her days designing, doodling, and drawing, helping create the visual images that represent Dropbox and all its various offerings to the outside world.

Lee describes the work that she and her colleagues do as a form of storytelling without words. It was really interesting to hear her talk about what she does in more depth, and its unique challenges:

“You’re showing your view of the world in some way to somebody who will immediately be able to interpret this visual thing that you’ve produced… I feel like illustration is about creating stories and usually metaphors. So at Dropbox, a lot of our product concepts are very abstract. So we need to, especially in user education, explain, ‘What is a sharing a file?’ That’s not a thing that really exists in the real world in the way that it exists in the digital Dropbox world.

…It’s like finding the seed to the flame. What is at the center of an emotion or feeling that you have that compels you to use this product?”

Watch Alice Lee talk about that and much more in the video embedded above.

Inside Jobs is a 12 episode miniseries from TechCrunch TV that gives an in-depth look at people in the job roles that really make the tech industry tick. Last week’s episode of Inside Jobs profiled Nadia Hussain, the community director at Polyvore.

Producing, shooting, editing, sound, and lighting for Inside Jobs is done by John Murillo. Production coordination and creative direction is done by Felicia Williams. Original logo design by Bryce Durbin. Motion graphics and graphic design by Eden Soto.