2017/2018 Holiday creative process
In almost every culture, holidays are tightly associated with the food and meals you enjoy in celebration. Every year the Brand team at OpenTable, together with the Marketing team, work to develop a campaign for the major Holidays — Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s Eve, Valentine’s Day, Mother’s/Father’s Day, Easter, Cinco de Mayo, Graduation, and others.
OpenTable works with restaurants who are interested in being featured on the promo pages we create for each holiday. We then produce assets such as banner ads and social imagery to help diners find their ideal place to celebrate.
The brand design team, composed of both designers and copywriters, collaborates to brainstorm and decide on a strategy and concept. We look at what was done in the previous year, how well it performed, what we learnt from it and how those learnings inform decisions we’ll make for this year’s campaign.
Last year (2016/2017) we worked with several illustrators to bring to life the concept of a gathering around a restaurant table. We had some beautiful illustrations by Owen Gatley, Raul Soria and Jeannie Phan.
Along with the illustrations, we also provided our Marketing and Social teams with photography and patterns with motifs related to each holiday. The goal was to test these three different visuals and get learnings from there.
Overall, even though not significantly, the illustrations performed better. This helped make the decision that this year (2017/1018) we would focus on illustrations.
We choose to work with external creatives, because we believe in collaboration, learning and being inspired by people outside our in-house design team. It’s incredible to step out of our usual methods, meet creative people, learn about their processes, what inspires them and get fresh perspectives. This brings us value as a team, and it helps bring new perspectives to the way we approach our brand.
I wanted to find someone with a bit of a different approach to illustration, someone that could bring life to the illustrations, make them feel touchable and present the food as the main character of the scene — and I found an illustrator that does just that: Polly Lindsay.
Polly’s work is incredible, with a beautiful approach to detail.
All of Polly’s illustrations are paper cut. This brings to the final pieces such a great sense of texture and form. She also does animations — a real plus for us.
Polly’s work is divided in three stages: sketch, digital illustration and final paper cut, that is then photographed. The entire marketing team at OpenTable were involved in every step of the process, so we can guarantee that all strategic input is incorporated before the last step: cutting out all the objects.
Next, we defined a concept and how we could bring it to live with Polly’s work.
At OpenTable, we believe in human to human connection, and that the restaurant is the place where some of life’s most meaningful moments can happen. So the challenge was how to make a special occasion, such as the Holidays, which are strongly based on traditions, feel fresh, new and captivating? During the holidays, is common for people to go home, spend time with their families and of course, eat loads of traditional food. We wanted to step away from tradition here, and present the restaurant table as a new place to celebrate — to break traditions, be adventurous, and try new things.
So for each holiday we thought about a set of dishes that would bring that sense of newness to the holiday. We created dishes like sushi for Christmas, dumplings for Thanksgiving and cheese fondue for New Years Eve. The assets created from the hero animations from Polly were then used for email banners, display ads, social media channels.
It was a long process, involving many stakeholders from different parts of the world. Making a project as big as this fit all markets is always a challenge. Some teams are more open to new ideas and different approaches than others. And I believe this is why it is important to not only work side by side the Marketing team when it comes to explaining the whys of the decisions we make as brand designers, but also involve and educate other teams, like Sales and Support, and these are the teams that deal directly with our customers.
I believe this project brought up questions like how we should approach illustration on our process and how does it help us define ourselves. This was a great opportunity to explore how our brand can utilize methods that we usually don’t consider as part of our process.
Hero images:
Banner ads:
