HP Black Friday campaign

Black Friday is the biggest campaign of the year for many brands and HP is not an exception.

My Role

The same month I joined HP Store I was asked to do some proposals for the Black Friday campaign and became its main designer for the whole EMEA region.

Requirements

· Beautiful
· Impactful
· Simple
· Innovative
 

Design

While researching I saw mostly a black background with an impactful key color standing out – normally red. They were effective but they looked very flat to me. I always loved natural elements and photography as part of a campaign, I wanted to bring some analog organic element into a digital campaign. I first thought about some powder and dust exploding but most of the times the assets I could find were too colorful for the theme.

At some point I found some beautiful black ink drops falling in water which fit very naturally with the HP Printing business and gave it a go.

With the help of my manager we played with an HP red color, capital letters and some square blocks to give the message a higher impact and break the organic shapes of the ink as a nice contrast.

Result

I was very new to the job so I essentially did not know how anything worked yet in so many ways.
In order to deliver I would need to learn most of the things on the go.

• Previous HP Store campaigns research
• Competition research
• First ideas presentation to manager
• Idea selection and first work on the concept
• Understanding website limitations and possibilities
• Offer landing website design: background, product blocks, CSS styling…
• First mockup by developers.
• Presentation to the business and countries for feedback
• Iteration on design and the development including feedback
• Home page design
• Template creation for multiple assets
• Template application for all assets along with the design team: emails, affiliate banners for 8 EMEA countries.

Problem solving

Process & expectations

I joined HP in August, a low-activity time for campaigns so I had no idea how the process of a big campaign was in any way inside the design team and the company. I had to learn to ask many questions and to be always thinking on them before a meeting so I could get all doubts solved at once if possible.
Many questions got to me along the way, especially one coming from developers: how does this work on mobile.

HTML structure

The website has several pre-developed blocks to display content. As much as a developer could explained me about them it was not until I experimented with them my self for some hours that I truly understood their limitations and possibilities that would allow me to design the offer page and how each of the products would look like.

Background size

In the beginning the ink was going through the mosaics but it was discarded by the limitations we had and also because it was not necessary and could be using necessary space for the offers.
When the decision to keep the ink on the background came, I had to design it in a way where it could be nicely compressed without loosing too much quality. The risk of using a photographic element so rich in grey colors made the background heavier. In order to preserve the good performance of the site correctly we had to sacrifice a bit of its quality.

Localizations: languages & messaging

Dealing with 8 different stores and 7 languages tough me a lot very quickly. I had to keep in mind that germanic or roman languages tend to use longer words than what I could write on an English template. Every country had a way to express an offer, so I learnt that for a big campaign you must design for multiple cases and offers, as there is rarely a standard offer for all countries.
Designing hundreds of affiliate and email banners, tought me patience and perseverance.
Sometimes, changes will happen and I learnt to not blaming the requester, but to be humble and try to provide help and the best service I could to our Stores in such a delicate campaign.

Conclusion

Black Friday was definitely the most challenging way to start working for the company. As the biggest campaign of the year I learnt everything around campaign process and production all at once. I did my best to deliver and adapt high quality designs working hand-by-hand with developers and people involved on the different countries.

Initially the campaign was going to be displayed on EMEA only – already targeting billions of people – but it ended up being applied in other countries and in LATAM in 2017, so I am pretty satisfied with the result.