Facebook's design manager leaves for the Designer Fund
Ben Blumenfeld, who was tasked with making the social network's platform more user friendly, is the fourth executive to depart from the company in one week.
Facebook heavyweight Ben Blumenfeld is stepping down from the social network, according to a blog post he wrote today. Blumenfeld was the company's design manager and had been at Facebook since 2007. He is leaving to co-direct the Designer Fund.
This news comes as three high-level managers and directors left the company last week, including the director of platform partnerships Ethan Beard, platform marketing director Katie Mitic, and mobile platform marketing manager Jonathan Matus.
Blumenfeld was tasked with making Facebook's platform more accessible. "We were building great products, but not doing a great job of guiding people through the changes, or telling them why they were important," he told TechCrunch.
He worked through several design and platform challenges at the social network. He told Tech Crunch that his final project was to guide users in how to transition to Timeline, which was the biggest redesign on the platform since the beginning of news feed.
Now, he is moving onto the Designer Fund, which has the goal of investing in designers that create business geared toward positive social change. He helped found the group with co-director Enrique Allen in April 2011. Its sponsors include Andreessen Horowitz and 500 Startups.
"This is an ambitious undertaking," Blumenfeld wrote in the blog post. "As one of my mentors told me -- 'If you leave Facebook, it has to be for something important. Something huge.' For me, helping the next generation of designer entrepreneurs build world changing companies is exactly that."