Well, sort of in a bit of a roundabout way…

It’s funny how these things happen. I was meeting with a fine customer of mine about some ongoing projects. I do a variety of work with them from print design, web work and UI design. I entered the offices and was beckoned to sit down whilst my contact was on the phone, not usual, he’s a busy chap.

“Yeah, my design guy is here, now, we’ll have a chat and see if we can’t put something together.”

Interesting. Obviously talking about a new element to a project or something.

But it was more interesting than that. It turned out that the phone call was from a Korean contact, someone from Samsung to be precise. They we’re putting the final pieces together for a presentation that was to be held at IFA in Berlin (one of the worlds largest consumer electronics shows). They were showcasing their new Gear S2 smart watch and wanted some screens that showcased b2b application possibilities on the device.

Thanks to the bank holiday, we only had a day to turn it around in time for the showcase.

So we had a look at what the device was supposed to do, how we thought a project that was being developed for the current Gear S could be applied from a rectangular screen to a circular device with a bezel based rotating selector system and I disappeared to burn the midnight oil and propose some draft screens.

Once we’d tweaked a few elements, the designs were sent to the folks in South Korea…

“These look awesome. I have forwarded it to our marketing team for their review.”

A positive response, but we didn’t get any feedback before the event regarding if they’d actually use any of the work. So on Thursday 3rd September at 6pm I fired up the Samsung event live stream and watched as they launched the new Gear S2. About 20 minutes in, sure enough, up popped a presentation slide on the huge screen with one of my designs!

So there we go, that’s how I ended up designing stuff for Samsung, the worlds largest IT company.

The full set of mockups sent to Korea