The Lily on Snapchat
In November 2019, I led the launch of The Lily’s Snapchat Discover channel.
As someone with prior experience working on Snapchat and on Lily projects, I was tasked with leading the design for this channel. To start, I built over 15 templates, wrote a style guide and trained four designers in AfterEffects. For the year after launch, I continued designing and editing the editions and helped with story planning.
Our Lily Snapchat portfolio won an Award of Excellence in SND’s Best of Digital Design in 2020. Six of my individual story designs (Who is Jenny B., A Very Lily Thanksgiving parade, Hallmark Christmas, Farris does Faces, College Students and Lady Santa) for The Lily’s Snapchat also won Awards of Excellence in 2019.
Process
As part of this project, I wrote detailed documentation for the style, as well as a guide to AfterEffects.
Here’s what that process involved.
Rules: For consistency, I wrote guidelines for colors, typography and animation.
Templates: I designed 10+ AfterEffects templates. The goals of these templates were to minimize the extra work that the addition of this platform would create for designers, create guidelines for how much text should be written on snaps, and create a design identity that would be unique to this platform.
Training: I trained five designers from our team in AfterEffects (ranging from no experience to basic experience) to be able to contribute to The Lily’s Snapchat. To make things easier, my documentation also included a guide to AfterEffects. I wrote out my favorite animation tips, frequently used effects, useful scripts, suggested ways of setting up your workspace and a glossary of terms related to animation and Snapchat. This documentation continues to be used for designers in the department beyond this project.