Nextdoor Nabs Former Square Design Director Paco Viñoly to Help Build Its Brand

Nextdoor, a neighborhood social networking company, has hired Square’s former design director Paco Viñoly as its new VP of Design.

Viñoly joined the company in late March and will lead everything design-related at Nextdoor from internal design — the physical look and feel of the office — to product design and events, he told Re/code.

That’s a wide range of responsibilities, and one of the main reasons Viñoly decided to join Nextdoor.

“It’s not always that way, but I believe that’s the way it should be,” he said of keeping all design elements under one person. “To have some consistency throughout is important.”

At Square, Viñoly was responsible for brand and marketing design, including things like product packaging, events, and advertising. Before that, he spent two years at Yahoo doing user experience design.

At Nextdoor, Viñoly says his top priority will be improving the actual product, a social network specifically for the people in your neighborhood. He says that by doing that — making things simpler and cleaner — he’ll be able to achieve his second priority: Growing the company’s user base.

Nextdoor is already seeing substantial user growth. It has users from more than 58,000 neighborhoods across the country, up from 22,500 neighborhoods 18 months ago. But growing that user base should be top of mind for Nextdoor, especially since the company just took $110 million in a new funding round that values the four-year-old startup at $1.1 billion.

Bringing on an experienced designer could also help Nextdoor boost its brand recognition. Despite the billion dollar valuation, Nextdoor doesn’t have nearly as much name recognition as other social networks or neighborhood-focused sites like Craigslist.

Viñoly will report directly to Nextdoor CEO Nirav Tolia.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.