Women of Qualified: Klarisse

Meet Klarisse Gepilano (KG), designer extraordinaire at Qualified. KG is an all-star designer who majored in Condensed Matter Physics in college. Learn more about how KG thinks about her creative process, how she deals with feedback, and more below. ⬇️

Where do you find inspiration?

KG: It really depends on the task or the project. If you're an artist, you get inspiration from whatever is your muse. If you paint a lot of landscapes, you get inspiration from nature, for example. A lot of big designers say that the best place to get inspiration is from outside design. That means art books, or if you're in a museum, or if you're in a physical space that can inspire you.

What’s your creative process?

KG: The design process usually entails making a lot of options. Then you iterate and you talk with either a stakeholder or, in my case with my creative director, Jimmy. From there, we kind of edit it down and ask for feedback all around. Hopefully what everyone agrees on is the correct design solution!

 How do you handle feedback?

KG: Anything creative can have a lot of a designer's emotion in it. There's a reason why in design school (which I didn't go to design school), but there's a reason why they have this thing called 'constructive criticism', where you present your design in front of your whole class and everyone kind of criticizes it or gives you feedback. It's really important for designers to know how to take it. So I learned by experience not to take any of it personally. I like to say I'm not really married anything that I create because at the end of the day, the design has to solve the problems of the stakeholders.

What made you decide to be a designer?

KG: I am big fan of Korean pop music. If you're familiar with CDs, they always came in like this plastic packaging, and for Korean pop, there was always a booklet; this was in 2006 or 2005. Their CDs were very different, and the design was really fun in addition to the plastic case. My interest really started from there!

I also liked making websites on the side for fun. I didn't even know that being a designer was a job you could have throughout college. So I started freelancing and I learned design in a self-taught manner. I didn't really go to design school until I was already working as a designer and took some courses.

What’s your favorite project that you’ve worked on at Qualified?

KG: I always enjoy a project where a lot of people are involved. I don't know if maybe it's just out of recency, but I really enjoyed Xforce because there was a really tight timeline. The timeline made everyone be on the same page in terms of how fast we needed to move the design forward. I was able to do some illustrations as well, which was not a typical thing in my project. We were able to make a website with some cool animations and pretty much anything that is 'out of the box' is a lot of fun. So I think that's my favorite!‍

Lastly, hit me with a humble brag 😏

KG: Working at a company at this stage lets me have an imprint on the company, brand, and culture. That's my top thing. There's maybe a couple of other things I really want to say, but it's under NDA 🕵🏻

KG is an integral member of the Marketing team an incredible designer that's helped build Qualified's brand. Check out her favorite project over on qualified.com/xforce.