Winter School Holidays eDM
Agency
AKQA, 2020
Client
Officeworks
Overview
The client requested a fun, “out of the box” design for their Winter School Holidays email of 2020. As the designer on the account my role was to research, brainstorm, wireframe, liaise, present, iterate and create.
This eDM design was a highlight from my time on the account. The client and I were struggling to align on a creative direction for the campaign. I decided to set up and run a remote workshop in MIRO where I arranged different tasks and activities for us to do so I could get a clear understanding of their vision for the design.
―
Snapshot of the MIRO board we collaborated in
The Workshop
As everyone was working from home in 2020 I had to find a way of holding a remote workshop. I chose to use MIRO as everyone could see and interact with the content. We only had 2 hours for the workshop so I made sure to allocate time to each activity I had planned. We started with recapping the brief and going over some feedback from the first round of design. This was so everyone was aligned on the brief and we had a single source of truth to refer back to.
―
Concept designs presented in the first round with client feedback
Concept round review
The client and our team both made comments with post-it notes about what we thought was working and what elements could be improved. We asked the client to think about the visual layout, the customer experience and the content. The feedback was then quickly synthesised and broken down into sections such as visual elements, layout, copy, optimisations, customer journey and narrative.
Inspiration and research review, asking “what are the best in the biz doing?”
Research and inspiration
By collating some examples of what other brands are doing was a great way to spark inspiration and educate the client on ways to layout content in a fun and engaging way, especially when it came to product and educational content working together.
4 directions we came up with from the workshop
Feedback on concepts
The client then had time to comment on what they liked about the designs we had developed and iterated on since the last round of designs. This gave us a heap of direction to go on with.
Final Designs
The workshop was a great success for both myself and the client. The workshop resulted in a fun ‘out of the box’ design which is what was requested. I bought a 'research mindset' into this project and actively seeked out data that was available to me. I began to understand the various sources data available, such as open rates on different devices, A/B tested components within the eDM's and worked closely with the developer so that we could successfully build this design to reflect the designs but also ensure it’s accessibility.
