You know the little white card readers and registers at your local café. I was hired as a part of Square's e-commerce product design team to bring the same notoriety and magic to Square Online.
My first question when a buttoned-up fintech asked me to join was Why? Within the first several months, I'd found my penchant for neo-grotesk fonts and storyteling with motion design were actually a good fit with the direction of the business.
During my several years at Square, I evolved not only the motion language of my product area, but also contributed my expertise to projects with Afterpay, Cash App, and our internal AI working groups.
With the myriad features available with the Square Online product, most of our go-to-market work served a dual purpose: showcasing + educating. One of the challenging aspects of marketing features with only static imagery was that webpage, in-product marketing, and emails would resemble long-form tutorials.
By utilizing animations, a few seconds was enough to show off our product's capabilities with a single punchy, effective & delightful asset.
Before I was moved into my role as an interactive product designer, my day-to-day was dictated by a hectic GTM strategy where our creative team was tasked with creating collateral for upwards of 50 new feature launches a year.
Thanks to the advocacy of our creative director and a shift in product strategy, we prioritized deeper, iterative work between two large campaigns a year. In 2023 into Q1 of 2024, this was website theming.
The 0:15 spot here was part of our output from that campaign. I was tasked with storyboarding, motion direction & audio selection for these spots produced by a partner agency.
During my tenure at Square, the emergence of AI tools for consumer use presented a unique marketing challenge. How do we convince hesitant users that these tools aren't necessarily harbingers of a sci-fi dystopian nightmare, but simple tools to run their businesses more efficiently and with way less busywork?
Above is one example showcasing the capabilities of an AI-assisted menu generation tool, removing hours of manual input with a few inputs and a single click.
One of my favorite projects I contributed to during all four years at Square was creating collateral for our machine-learning operated Photo Studio app (boasting an impressive 4.8 ⭐️ rating on Apple App Store).
My work with the ML team earned me a patent, a winning hackweek project, and a lot of insight into how to market AI products to a mass market audience. See the product ->
Most of Square's ecosystem involves 11 unique linguistic locales. Besides the obvious difficulty of multiplied work, using After Effects to produce motion assets in-the-box introduced the complexity of planning motion projects to accommodate and be iterated in any of 11 languages.
With no processes in place for localizing motion assets, I used clever scripts and file organization (plus, some basic understanding of Spanish, Japanese, Catalonian, French) to develop a workflow that kept my working relationship with our localization specialists in the green.
