I had the role of Art Director on many major marketing campaigns during my time at Bonfire. I was setting the objectives, the audience, and assessing the key message and vibe that we were going for. My responsibilities included conceptualizing and leading the creative vision, collaborating with the design team and other stakeholders, and ensuring the campaign's visual elements aligned with the overall brand strategy. It was extremely rewarding to see these campaigns come to life!
I led our Brand Marketing Team (once known as the creative marketing team). I worked with our Content Specialist, our Lead Marketing Designer, and our Community Engagement Specialist (social media) to ensure that every project was cohesive, had objectives, met brand standards, and was going to benefit us in the end.
Over the last 1-2 years, we really honed in on creating micro brands for different things like Giving Tuesday, Giving Season, Best of Bonfire, etc. These were different ways that we leaned into our existing brand, focused on certain elements/colors, and maybe added in a new font for that specific campaign. This allowed us to stay creative and create work that stood out while continuing to comply with our Brand Guidelines.
Designer: Maddie Summers
Best of Bonfire 2021
Best of Bonfire required many months of planning and coordination, as it is a contest that we create for our community to participate in. We knew we wanted it to be visually identifiable, but different than the following years of using a simple pencil icon.
Art Direction: The feel of these illustrations was to be simple yet complex. Leaning into our primary color palette, with a twist. each new graphic was revealed as the contest got more and more involved. The irony of more pencils being added, as more designs were being eliminated from the contest...
Along with the following blog posts, we had content calendars filled with instagram stories to increase engagement, instagram main feed posts to send reminders, and of course, email series to ensure we had submissions.
- Finalists post
- Winners post
Giving Season 2022
Giving Season, which is also our busiest time of the year, is something that we began planning for in mid summer. This includes Giving Tuesday, a huge day for nonprofits, and all of the important dates leading up to the holidays and, of course, our shipping deadline. Because of the sheer quantity of content that needs to go out during this time, we decided on finding a color palette (within our existing palette) that made sense here. Our designer then added a variety of new, on brand, illustrations for the occasion to our asset library.
Art Direction: The feel of these illustrations was your typical holiday vibe. We leaned into the cozy inside, cool outside feeling as we promoted most of our cold weather products. Cool colors mixed with some splashes of warmth to bring you back to that wood-burning fireplace in the living room...
I was in charge of Giving Season for quite a few years, and learned a lot each time. It was important for us to template-ize our strategy so that each year we were not reinventing the wheel. We knew the marks that we needed to hit, the dates we needed to push content on, and so on. It was important for us to keep things visually interesting, as some of the content ends up carrying through year after year (shipping deadlines, return policies, promoting Giving Season, etc.) We had weekly monthly check ins that became weekly check ins and each team member was responsible for bringing the work for their channel to ensure everything was cohesive and ready to go.