Sam Morgan
designer
SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING
As a designer at Peacocks part of my role was to design social content to be used by the social media team, developing templates from campaign content and editing motion graphics to help drive engagement to the store.
See more on my role at Peacocks here
September 2019 - February 2020
MOTION
GRAPHIC
& SOCIALS
BRIEF
At Peacocks I was put in charge of creating social assets, which gave me a good opportunity to build a relationship with the social media manager and gain social marketing experience.
This gave me a passion for marketing trends, I would engage with social media trends and bring trends that I saw from competitors to the social media manager, which they’d utilise for our social feed. Such as ‘build an outfit’ edits, which I suggested for a Halloween campaign, using Peacocks clothes to build layered outfit collages as inspiration. This was later integrated into further campaigns, such as at Christmas (e.g. a Christmas tree inspired outfit).
When I had free time, I would build my design skills by experimenting with new visuals, by researching and saving competitor examples to present to the management, which led to multiple successful campaigns. This made me feel motivated, engaged and valued. I still enjoy this side of work due to the positive experienced that I had with it.
Usually, I would be asked to create motion graphics for stories, these could be text moving into frame, or products moving across screen. For example, the title of a promotion would pop onto screen, or the slides would be motion out of shot rather than a hard cut between slides, which would make the use of socials more interactive/engaging for the users.
When we started producing motion graphics instead of still images our engagement statistics were improved across social. People were interacting with the page longer and more frequently, so the site traffic was algorithmically improved.
IDEATION
I would usually start making a layout on Photoshop creating layered templates, which I would take into After- effects as psd assets to edit. This means that the elements were editable in Photoshop if future amends were required.
I began by creating the motion elements in Photoshop, however I later taught myself to use After-effects as my content became more complex and Photoshop couldn’t keep up with the requirements.
I Taught myself After-effects as I wanted to update my skill-set to align with the more ambitious graphics that I wanted to create.
REVIEW
I really enjoyed this responsibility, and I was eager to pick up similar work in newer jobs. I found a passion for motion content which I developed later with video editing at Dyson.
I was proud of the work I created as it was very effective for the brand’s progression, which was backed up by page statistics. People would spend more time on the page as they waited for the graphics to play though rather than scrolling fast through a series of slow images. Due to this success, higher management permitted further development with motion content, which allowed me a lot of creative freedom to make new suggestions for content.