From 2018 to 2021, I worked as an graphic designer in Office Depot’s headquarters’ email marketing department. We sent a hundreds, if not thousands, of emails during my time there, and we also occasionally worked on social media assets and landing page mockups for the website. We designed all of our assets in Photoshop and uploaded them to “Movable Ink” (and sometimes Salesforce), so that the email marketing managers could set the emails up and send them out to the millions of email subscribers.

Now on to some of my favorite GIFs and more. This was one of the “Saturday solos” about organizational supplies that I put together from beginning to end.

The right column above shows the animated pieces a little larger so you can see them in their full, glorious GIF forms. The fourth piece wasn’t animated, it actually showed the email subscribers first name (if we had it on file) on the yellow label.

For this email, I searched and found all of the products, wrote the copy, and of course made all of the digital assets. Three of the four squares at the end were animated (I’ll show those individually after the email below). In the fourth square (a labeling machine), I used Movable Ink’s awesome first name personalization feature to put the email recipient’s first name on the label, like the label was printing out the customer’s name! I was pretty proud of myself. 

And below is a playful “hero” from on of the regular weekly promotional emails in 2021. We liked to have the products kind of falling off of the ad as you’ll see at the bottom. I learned that from the awesome team at Office Depot.

And here was a simple animated hero I did for a breakroom supplies promotion. I got a lot of compliments on this one from the team, and it was so quick to make!

I thought this animation was a pretty smart use of the red rectangular element the brand team was wanting us to use at the time.

Another playful piece that went below a back-to-school hero.

Technology sale, subtle animation on the screen. Making animations could be tricky sometimes, because we had to keep the file size pretty low so as not to take a million years to load in the customer’s inbox.

That might be it for the animations I happened to save. This one below is a promotional hero showing the use of Movable Ink’s countdown timer. Get the customers feeling a little sense of urgency!

This was an office chair solo, where customers could vote on the poll options for their preferred chair type.

And here was a Saturday solo email sponsored by Epson. See Shaq’s arm? Like I mentioned, we were really into having objects (and people) peeking out of the frame.

Here’s my last image share for the day, a Saturday solo featuring Office Depot’s private brand “TUL” pens and notebooks.

In conclusion, it was an amazing experience working with such a great team. They were so funny, witty, and smart. We used to get to write the copy for the emails as well, and I was always so impressed by what my colleagues came up with. I learned so much during my three years in the email marketing department. Despite being several moons older than my colleagues, I consider them all to be my unofficial mentors. Such talent! Awww… Memories… I really miss working with them!

Other than the people, the work was fun too! Some of the most enjoyable projects I mentioned were the Saturday solos. You really got to sink your teeth into a project. I love making animated GIFs, so I would usually animate a piece or two in each “solo”. Often you wouldn’t get a lot of direction from the marketing managers, and honestly I liked it that way. I enjoyed trying to analyze whatever the theme was and coming up with something mostly on my own and then presenting it early. I usually work pretty fast and would get my work done very early so I could show the team and get feedback. Movable Ink also has this fun feature where you can make a poll within the email and you can see the voting results real-time. I used to love coming up with use cases for the polls.

I also worked in Office Depot’s private brand department (on package design) for a few years between 2014 and 2016, but that’s a blog post for another day!

about me

I am an experienced freelance graphic artist based in South Florida. With over 15 years in the graphic design field, I have worked for a diverse range of companies and clients. I specialize in print design (including package design, catalogs, flyers, business cards, collateral), as well as digital graphics (such as email marketing graphics, animated GIFs, landing page designs, web banners and more). My work is characterized by efficiently and successfully interpreting the request and translating it into a finished design. I am excited about the opportunity to work on new graphic design projects. If you’d like to work with me (or just say hello!), you can contact me at www.giddyhedgehog.com/contact.