Holiday e-Card

Sarah had consistent brand visuals using the colors blue and yellow and the typeface Montserrat.

I added navy and grey to her brand colors so that the visual elements in the interactive piece would have enough contrast to stand out from one another, and I could illustrate with a wider value range.

Something I didn't immediately consider was the treatment of the edges in the illustrations. I started to illustrate with rough brushes, but after hearing her feedback I realized that it would integrate better with her existing brand visuals if I gave everything a consistent, clean edge.

I brainstormed different ways we could incorporate interactive moments with a universal, winter holiday theme.

After some brainstorming, Sarah and I landed on the idea of an e-card where you can discover the ending to a holiday greeting, through clicking and hovering around two holiday scenes - and indoor scene and an outdoor scene.

The card prompts the user with the words: "Lightbulb wishes you a happy new year filled with..."

The user then has the opportunity to click around and find the things Sarah Wolman's company wishes for her clients to have in the new year.

Over the 3 years I approached the limitations of the email format in different ways:

Email to Web Browser: The first year I embedded the e-card onto her website and added a picture that linked to the e-card in the email she sent out to her clients.

The pros of this approach were that we could incorporate interactivity, but there was no guarantee they would be at their computer to open the email, in which case the e-card wouldn't work. It created a potentially disjointed experience for the user.

Email with Animations and CSS: In subsequent years, I created emails that were nicely laid out and incorporated animated gifs instead of interactivity. The downsides of this approach were that the experience didn't allow as much participation, but where it shined is that it took less time to implement and could be viewed entirely in their email provider.

Over the years, the amount of time and resources I was able to dedicate to this project got smaller and smaller. The first year, I had 4 weeks to dedicate solely to the project. With this last iteration, I had about 1 week to complete it, and only a few of those hours to dedicate to it.

Sarah and I agreed on smaller scopes for each year's project as the time allotted for it dwindled. We focused more on the business opportunity than the pizazz.

In this last iteration, we agreed to reuse animations from the second e-card, have one custom illustration, and add more text to announce things going on in her business that her clients should be aware of. This smaller, but impactful design allowed the product to still be polished even though we had limited time.