Digital Campaigns at Sleed
Agency work teaches you speed, and speed teaches you what you actually believe, because there is no time left over for decorating.
The brief
I joined Sleed in 2021 as a designer and left in 2023 as an art director with a team. In between came the work that fills an agency year: social content that has to go out whether or not anybody feels inspired, campaigns with a date on them, pitches that are won and pitches that are not. This page gathers that period in one place. Each of these has its own page too, for anybody who wants the whole of it, but seen together they say something the separate pages cannot, which is what three years of that pace does to the way a person works.
The idea
Five clients, and each of them wanted something different from me. Nuxe wanted photographs that had never been photographed, so the products were built into their scenes in Photoshop, packshot by packshot, in the years before anyone could ask a machine to do it. Frezyderm needed a children's sun care campaign picked up halfway through and carried to an open-air cinema screen, where I learned that a film for a courtyard in July is the opposite of a film for a feed. Amgen was three years of health content under guidelines so tight that the two campaigns everyone loved could not run. Rabbit was a grocery delivery pitch that came to me at the last minute, all yellow and carrots and a rabbit's speed. Thanopoulos was a year of supermarket posting designed as a system, for a pitch that did not come our way. Different brands, different rooms, one habit underneath: find the single thing the work is actually about, then build everything else around it and throw the rest away.
The detail
What an agency really trains is the hand. Three years of that and you stop hesitating: you know how long a retouch will take before you start it, you know which layout will survive being resized eleven times, you know when a piece of motion is a day's work and when it is three. I built product scenes that fool my own eye, motion on top of licensed footage, template systems for people who are not designers, and films for a screen the size of a building. None of it was mine alone. There were copywriters, account managers and other designers in every one of these, and the good ideas came out of rooms rather than out of one head. What was mine was the art direction, the design, and eventually a team to hand some of it to.
- Social campaigns, films, templates and pitch work at Sleed, 2021–23
- Nuxe · Frezyderm · Amgen · Rabbit · Thanopoulos, plus the agency's own channels
- Designer on arrival, art director with a team by 2023
- Rabbit and Thanopoulos were speculative pitches that did not run
- Each of these projects also has a page of its own
- Rights reserved by Sleed and the respective brands
- 3 years · designer to art director
- 5 brands · 2 pitches
- Bronze Effie, 2022
Since then
Two and a half months after I arrived I was given a pay rise and made art director, with a team of my own, on the strength of the Bookvoice launch. A Bronze Effie followed in 2022 for that campaign, in the Low Budgets category.
I left in 2023 for a different kind of work — slower, more physical, closer to the making. But I would not give these three years back. Everything I know about deciding quickly and being right often enough, I learned here.