Some of the Marriott Bonvoy projects that I've worked on for the Data Axle team
Since joining Data Axle in April 2023 as a Senior Designer, I've had so many incredible opportunities to design award-winning emails for their client, Marriott Bonvoy and all the hotel brands across their portfolio, including their luxury brands such as The Ritz-Carlton and St. Regis.
I've also learned how to use After Effects & Premier Pro to create fun & engaging animated images for heroes and images for usage in email. In addition to picking up these new skills, I've also learned new knowledge from strategy teams like A/B testing emails, clickthrough rate & clipping.
So far, 2024 has been a year of exciting and challenging projects! This year saw more Ritz-Carlton and luxury branded emails, which was a nice change of pace for me and pushed me to think even more critically and explore innovative ideas to make email designs more interesting to look at.
For this September send, I brought in some new shapes to refresh the look in the hero and in some of the modules. The heroes in the past have always been just simple, full-width rectangular shapes. But I wanted to bring in a more interesting depth to it by adding in some circular shapes & a subtle pattern from the luxury branding. And since this email was going to international audiences, I had to be mindful of the imagery and make sure that while there were still those warm, fall-like colors throughout the images, they shouldn't be too specific to fall.
As you scroll down the email, you can see that I've brought in more oval/circular shapes to match similar designs that can be seen on the Ritz-Carlton website here. I've also brought in the subtle honeycomb again further down in the email to connect back to the hero.
View the live version of this email here.
Working on this project was also a bit of a challenging one because this client had a lot of restrictions on what images we could use, such as not showing anything that featured alcohol or not show too much skin. But it still had to look luxurious. The client also didn't want anything too stock-forward, and it's hard to find good photos that fit those guidelines. So it took a bit of creativity and some photoshopping to make things work.
Hero Image: I actually photoshopped the BetMGM logo onto the phone because the client really didn't have any lifestyle imagery that fit the bill, so while digging around Marriott's image library, I found this generic photo of a woman holding a phone that still looked kind of luxurious, and photoshopped the logo onto the phone.
The darker background versus the light white background that I'm more used to for designing emails was an interesting design choice, but I think it helped give a luxurious feel.
Overall it was a really fun project and the live view of the email can be viewed here.
For this October send going to US/Canada audiences, I was tasked with showing 3 different hero options to A/B/C test, with different headlines. In the hero image, I was able to showcase my animation skills by using Premier Pro to add in flickering flames to the fire in the image. The client loved the animated hero, in addition to the illustrated leaves that I also created in the email. It was a really great opportunity to show my illustrative skills, and it was also a very collaborative effort, as I got to work with one of the lead copywriters to put out this fun fall-themed email!
Fun fact: This email actually got nominated for the 2024 OMMA awards (hosted by MediaPost) in the Wildcard category for its creative language of "suite talking" subscribers with Autumn Offers.
View the live version of the email here.
This was one of the very first luxury brand emails that I ever got to work on, for the Ritz-Carlton Reserves team. It was a truly exciting experience for me, as I got to showcase my animation skills with After Effects & Premier Pro. The hero image and the various animated images throughout the email are strong examples of my skills as a designer and I really enjoyed being able to show the images of the stunning Ritz-Carlton Reserve properties through that. In addition to leading the design, I also collaborated with the copywriter to put out this beautiful Reserves email.
View the live version of this email here.