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UBS Seasonal Catalog
Client
UBS
Role
Senior Lead UX Designer
Applied Skills
UX/UI Design, Print Design, Graphic Design, Creative Direction, Communication, Presentation, Mentorship
Made With
InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, Jira, Acrobat
Problem
UBS needs a marketing campaign for a direct mailer that would feature a refined selection from their rewards catalog. Strict adherence to their branding guidelines is expected and required.
Project Goal
Create a 12-18 page rewards catalog that adheres to UBS brand guidelines. The catalog needs to feature an overall travel theme with placements for various marketing categories as well as redeemable items that will be selected to fit each category. Final export would need to be a 300dpi high quality PDF in the CMYK color space.
Impact
UBS was so impressed with the travel catalog, they went on to request entire campaigns of direct mailers. The usage and attentiveness to the branding guidelines on the piece lead UBS to publicly naming TSYS an official branding partner that year. Since then, TSYS has brought in multiple client portfolios for direct mail campaigns successfully creating a new product line and revenue stream. A project pipeline that continues to this day.
At the time of this request, I had steadily made a name for myself as the go to resource for all things digital media. Fellow co-workers around the office had even started referring to me as TSYS’s very own digital Jedi. So while TSYS had yet to produce a project like this for a client before, when the request came in, our project management team immediately directed it to my team.
Sitting down with marketing and project management, I was beyond excited by the new challenge and at the prospect of bringing TSYS into the vast world of print and direct mail as a new product offering. Work began on a whiteboard as I sketched out some quick layouts for discussion and live critique. By the end of the session we had a solid baseline for an 18 page travel catalog. From there I quickly mocked up a wireframe in illustrator of what we had finished on the whiteboard. The next step was to gather all branding documentation we could get our hands on from UBS that I then scoured and pulled everything related to print that we might need including digital assets such as their logo and graphical elements such as their iconic Key symbol. Working directly with marketing we began pulling images from our vendors for our lifestyle and product imagery that I proceeded to remove any existing shadows, optimize, and organize.
During this time I began to craft the overall layout within Indesign using placeholder text and color blocks to get everything aligned to my overall grid and margins. UBS’s branding guidelines required a healthy use of white space in between elements as well as in the images themselves making the hunt for Travel imagery quite challenging. Though I was able to accommodate the requirement, I found that such images were making the overall feel of the catalog rather cold and bland. Putting together a quick pdf to show examples, I reached out to UBS to offer the suggestion that Travel is meant to showcase aspirational views of destinations cardholders could see themselves in and then proceeded to offer them a compromise of much more colorful imagery that I had edited to bring in more of their required white in a much more meaningful yet subtle way without taking away from the Luminosity of the imagery. UBS’s marketing team wholeheartedly agreed while appreciating our guidance on the imagery. With that decision approved I was able to complete my first drafts of the catalog that I printed out and binded by hand and promptly set up a meeting with marketing and my design team to review and critique. After a few iterations were made, I exported a hi-rez PDF to present along with a compressed PDF to send over to UBS after for internal review. I then worked with the project management team to set a meeting with UBS where I presented our very first Travel catalog. With the success of the travel catalog came a flood of direct mail work to the point that we brought on more talent into our team to help handle the workload.
Around this time I began to take on a creative direction role for this project and proceeded to help plan, mentor, and advise each of our new designers to help ensure we retain the quality that UBS had come to expect from us. We also began working with a new print vendor that would become an incredible resource for the team. Once final mocks were approved, we would send off our designs to our vendor and schedule a press release where we would then go in person to oversee. Each piece would have its first run pulled so we could meticulously look over the piece for any imperfections or places in the imagery that needed to be altered. Once all was approved, we had a system of sign out where the designer on hand would sign off on the approved run to then start printing the entire batch. For the last phase of this project’s lifecycle, we had marketing add each of our designers to the direct mailing list so that once the piece was sent out, we would receive the final printed piece just as a cardholder would. This allowed us to check on the quality of the piece as it travels through the mail and to see first hand how the final folded pieces turned out.









