project background
“Thank You Patrons Day” was conceived of by our brand marketing team as an annual day for creators to reflect on their work, and thank the patrons that make it possible.
What started off a few years ago as a single tweet, has now evolved into a full-fledged brand awareness campaign. Our goal was to capture 75 million earned social impressions and to have a rate of 90% positive sentiment in these engagements. These goals were significantly larger than our previous benchmarks, and required us to push our efforts in the 2019 campaign.
ROLE
Lead designer, concept, creative direction, interaction design
NOTES
Produced at Patreon with brand designer, Evynne Doue.
Illustrations by Morgan Ramberg
Web development by Scott Van Zandt
Bringing the campaign to life
I worked with our brand marketing team to create a multi-pronged approach that helped us exceed these goals. Our work spanned a microsite, a video, and a kit of fun, illustrated social assets that helped us promote our efforts, and made it easy for creators to participate in the social campaign.
Process
As the lead designer on this project, my role was to be the bridge between our creative goals and the over-arching business goals. After consulting with my partners in brand marketing, we discussed these goals, and agreed on the solution of creating a fun, illustration-led social media campaign that launched through a microsite.
Throughout the design process, I facilitated the conversation between my teammates, and contractors through briefs, reviews, mock-ups and wireframes, and twice weekly standups to discuss general progress and blockers.
Microsite
The site was designed to accomplish these goals:
Celebrate the relationship between creators and their patrons
Publicize some newly released and impressive statistics about our platform and community
Host a video featuring key creators offering their own messages of thanks
Distribute a kit of social assets to facilitate easy participation in the campaign
Highlight noteworthy tweets that could serve as examples for participation
Illustrations by Morgan Ramberg, designed with Evynne Doue
Setting The Creative Direction
I worked with Morgan Ramberg to set the creative direction for the illustrations that permeate the entire campaign. The work was meant to convey a sense of cheerful optimism and promote ideas of gratitude and creative fulfilment. The illustrations served various purposes—social “stickers” and templates for customizing participant’s messages, UI elements for the site, and promotional images to promote the event in advance of Thank You Patrons Day.
Type illustrations by Morgan Ramberg, designed with Evynne Doue
Illustrations by Morgan Ramberg
Illustrations by Morgan Ramberg
Social Campaign
This campaign’s primary goal was to drive 75 million earned social impressions. While we wanted to promote brand awareness, the campaign also had to feel authentic to Patreon’s goal of always being “creator first.”
For this campaign to honor those intentions, we had to elevate our creators and celebrate their relationships with their patrons. This meant taking a step back and not dominating the day with our branding. The conversations that developed on social media was exciting to track and lived up to all our hopes for authenticity.
