As the solo Brand Designer at Pocket, I worked with Marketing Director Katie Wright, Creative Copywriter Mary O'Reagan, and later Design Technologist Mark Teater to create the branding elements for the product, communications, and marketing.

All design, animation, and illustration (with two noted exception) was executed by me – yay for tiny companies!

Pocket browser plugin in the store

2020 Pocket Top Reader campaign – a scrappy success

Pocket’s biggest event of the year. With no budget, we receive enormous publicity through the social promotion of top readers.

In 2019, the web portion took too many of our scarce engineering resources to build the traditional dynamic page, so in 2020 I was able to execute the campaign entirely through email. With a list generated from each of the groups (top 1%, 5% and 10%), a rich email with animated gifs was sent that included reader’s most essential stats (words in Pocket & equivalent books read) and resulted in more shares than ever.

Pocket End of Year

In addition to our Top Reader campaign, the end of the year milestone brings a second viral occasion: a celebration of our content. In 2020, we built on our previous efforts by launching multiple new category winners, an author partnership, and a publisher partnership.

Scroll animation in Best of 2020 website by Mark Teater

End of the year video with copywriting by Jane Goodwin-Bell

Illustration style

When I started at Pocket, I inherited an amazing set of 6 illustrations by Miguel Camprubi, and absolutely no budget to commission any more. I worked with the essential elements that came from our brand palette to create a few more illustrations in the family, and then worked to evolve into a new language.