Meet the Unsplash team: Susana Silvestre

Who are you and what’s your role at Unsplash?

Hey! I’m Susana and I’m part of the Design team as a Product Designer. We’re the cool emo ones in the corner. To this day, my grandfather still thinks I get paid to “do drawings” but we basically are the ones that make Unsplash look good and think of how to make it easy for everyone to use before the dev team swoops in and does their magic.

When did you join the team?

I’m brand new. Just joined the team in January and it’s been a fun ride so far. But I've also been a user for years, does that count?

Where do you live?

I live in sunny Lisbon in Portugal. I was born in the south margin of the Tejo river in Almada just south of Lisbon and, in between, lived for a few years in a small town called Covilhã, next to Serra da Estrela, the snowy mountains of Portugal. But Lisbon has been my home for almost 8 years now.

Where do you work?

I work mostly at home, I have an office that is currently a work in progress, just a desk and white walls but I'll get there. You can also find me crashing my friends places and working from there. I like to travel around so, basically, I work from anywhere.

What does a regular day at Unsplash look like for you

Usually working on current projects and iterations for the Unsplash site, always working on making it even better. In the mornings I'm usually alone, because of the time zones most of the team is still asleep so I'll just be inside Figma focused and doing my thing and then, some days, team meetings on the afternoons. Probably discussing labels on the Design meetings.

What is your favourite thing you worked on at Unsplash?

This is a hard one because I'm still new to the team so I can’t say much about current projects but I’ll just say that it’s really exciting because we have Unsplash+ now and there’s so many things that people want to see and I get to work on.

Favourite working snack?

This is really boring but probably I'll be having cashews, I love them. Wish I could be eating candy all the time though.

What do you do when you aren’t working on Unsplash?

I’m currently having Piano lessons, always loved the sound of the piano and never knew anything about music so that has been an exciting one. I’m also learning to roller skate, even tough I'm very clumsy so it’s a challenge. I do boxing to keep active and I like to play video games sometimes. And then you ask, how can I do so many things at the same time? I’m bad at most of them, that’s how. I always want to try so many things but there’s so little time!! I also have a side project with a couple friends called The studio is open, where we interview artists/artisans and talk about their creative spaces/studios. You can follow the instagram as well.

Describe yourself using 3 emojis

Where can people find you/chat to you?

I’m mostly on instagram but I recently made my first tweet so you can follow me there! You could also swing by my house but that would be weird.