CHALLENGE: By mid 2020 it seemed as though much of the world was at a standstill—this included my job as a designer. My boss wanted to help her fellow business owners but we also wanted to focus our energies on our own marketing campaign.

GOAL: To develop a digital asset that could be used as a marketing lead magnet for us while also functioning as a useful tool to get others thinking about productive ways to spend their pandemic downtime.

ROLE: Lead designer, working on a collaborative team with a local project manager and a remote copywriter.

OUTCOME: After several zoom meetings with our copywriter we all agreed on a collaborative e-book project—it had the potential to be informative, yet brief, and didn’t require printing, so it was cost effective and easy to distribute. The copywriter came up with a working draft that I used to create the book’s format and feel. His initial draft was a bit serious. I wanted the book to be something business owners wouldn’t mind skimming through after a long day of adulting, so it couldn’t look too ‘businessy.’  The team agreed so during my first iterations I paired the ‘doodle’ imagery with splashes of humor. I also decided to make the formatting interactive, with items to ponder and places to reflect. And in keeping with the fun, anti-adult quality, I added a mindfulness coloring page and quote cutouts for daily inspiration.

View the Pandemic Pushback e-Book

It was a success! We used it in our social and email campaigns and saw more than 100 downloads with lots of positive feedback, which was significant for our small company.