Discord celebrates and gives back to its community every year during the holiday season with a week-long event filled with contests, giveaways, and surprises called Snowsgiving. In 2022, the community raised $129,017 in support of Crisis Text Line. Discord summarized the event here. Our goal was to create visuals that were exciting but also cozy and nostalgic to lean into the holiday season aesthetic. We also needed to make the event look like it was a part of the overall Discord brand.
Create a cohesive, branded visual system for the event within the 2 month timeline that includes marketing assets for social, user acquisition ads, blog, merchandise, press, and in-product assets. The visuals also needed to work with the illustrated visual novel and the Snowsgiving hero video.
I worked closely with our project manager to create a master document to track notes outside of our Asana tickets. The Art School team brainstormed ideas on where to take the event visually and align the connected element, which was Wumpus and their outfit. I also set out to create an Adobe library in order to organize all of the assets and establish a design system that anyone on the team could pull from.
I worked with Fiona Tran, who took lead on merchandise, for the Snowsgiving merch collection.
Kelsey Borcherding (Sr. Illustrator) and Mariam Naziripour (Sr. Copywriter) designed a visual novel specific to the event and our motion team lead the hero video.
Our illustrators: Kevin Dam, Gica Tam, and Justin Middendorp illustrated the delightful character art for the event.
This was an incredible team effort across many, many disciplines.
In the Discord app, I designed assets to be used on the in-product page specifically for Snowsgiving. This was a new endeavor for our teams and I collaborated with our Senior Staff Product Designer, Daniel Destefanis to make it happen. We incorporated a new tab in the app's sidebar, which opened to this page, leading users to our different call-to-action's and blurbs about the event.
The marketing teams wanted to create a Discord bot for users to interact with throughout the event. Discord bots are user-like members that users can add to their server that allows other users to interact and engage with it for various actions and responses. In this case, the bot was the facilitator for a three-team, community-wide game and included a fishing game for special rewards. It was also an avenue for the marketing team to directly announce the daily activities through it.
I proactively involved our team as early as possible to work between marketing and engineering to design the necessary assets. These assets included the bot's avatar and header as well as the images that the bot would produce when users inputted certain commands.
Below are the Discord Town Hall animation and video background assets I designed. The Discord Town Hall is a Discord server specifically for the community and where our community team directly communicates with users on the platform. This is most likely one of the first touchpoints many users would see the event other than on social media. I designed the server invite background, various images that would go with announcements, and the server banner to theme it to the event.
I created many assets for social including Instagram story templates and feed images, including Charli XCX assets for the event partnerships team. These images were used across Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Additionally, I worked with our localization team to make sure the assets worked for our French and Japanese audiences. Below are a select few of our English posts.
For the sticker and emoji rewards in-app, I designed quite a number of options which our Sr. Motion Designer, Kevin Okulolo, then animated.
I also collaborated with Joshua Jouppi, our motion design lead who created these assets, to align the hero video and motion design-related deliverables with the rest of the event brand.
In the Discord app, I designed assets to be used on the in-product page specifically for Snowsgiving. This was a new endeavor for our teams and I collaborated with our Senior Staff Product Designer, Daniel Destefanis to make it happen. We incorporated a new tab in the app's sidebar, which opened to this page, leading users to our different call-to-action's and blurbs about the event.
The marketing teams wanted to create a Discord bot for users to interact with throughout the event. Discord bots are user-like members that users can add to their server that allows other users to interact and engage with it for various actions and responses. In this case, the bot was the facilitator for a three-team, community-wide game and included a fishing game for special rewards. It was also an avenue for the marketing team to directly announce the daily activities through it.
I proactively involved our team as early as possible to work between marketing and engineering to design the necessary assets. These assets included the bot's avatar and header as well as the images that the bot would produce when users inputted certain commands.
Below are the Discord Town Hall animation and video background assets I designed. The Discord Town Hall is a Discord server specifically for the community and where our community team directly communicates with users on the platform. This is most likely one of the first touchpoints many users would see the event other than on social media. I designed the server invite background, various images that would go with announcements, and the server banner to theme it to the event.
I'd love to hear from you! Drop me an email at jackiechenhere@gmail.com or find me on twitter @squimshed, on Dribbble, and on LinkedIn.
