Working with an international brand
One of the biggest perks to working with a marketing/design agency is being exposed to a wide variety of clients. It was through my team at Moosylvania that I was able to reach the audience that PayPal, or more specifically PayPal Credit, had garnered. I was honored to create for such a well-known brand—and I learned a lot about my role and how to operate at this scale.
Just another photography project
When this project reached my desk I was immediately intrigued, but it also felt familiar. This slotted into my workload between handling photography and art direction for the social media of several different brands. I was familiar with working with PayPal but this was the first time I had been asked to photograph for them.
My challenge was to showcase a brand new product offering from PayPal—and to explore some of the top spending categories for their customers. Our team settled on three themes, technology, shopping, and travel.
What followed was, retrospectively, a pretty comical few days of trial and error, getting my lighting just right, going to every art store in town to find the best textured, blue paper, and trying to find which items I owned looked great from above. This also meant getting the camera's focal length just right so that items like my speakers had a bit more dimension to them, as opposed to just seeing white rectangles. After capturing the images and color correcting, I painstakingly removed badges, brands, and each letter from every keycap on the keyboard in Photoshop to keep a clear focus on the featured product.
The items in each photograph were carefully selected to create a color scheme that enhanced PayPal's own colors. I personally fit very well into the technology and travel themes, and each piece of tech was something straight from my studio at home. It was the shopping theme that I wasn't quite equipped for. I knew this category would work best with a more feminine selection of products, so I sheepishly went around asking coworkers to lend me or bring in their purses, new pairs of shoes, and other items until I was happy with my composition.
PayPal's Launch of the 2% Cash Back Mastercard
On August 30, 2017, PayPal launched the PayPal Cashback Mastercard, touting it's 2% cash back on every purchase. This was PayPal's first ever cash back credit card after previously launching credit cards with rewards points benefits. With a press release from PayPal Newsroom, my photographs were now available for any news organization to feature as they introduce this card to the world.
If I'm honest, I didn't register the scale of the project I had worked on until that morning. Photography had become part of daily life for me while working at Moosylvania and my work rarely reached beyond a brand's social media presence. When I got to my desk on the 30th, the first question a co-worker asked me was whether I had seen what was happening across the internet yet.
My photographs were everywhere, and they were being featured by some of the biggest names in financial media. As a young designer who had just recently graduated from college, it was probably the first time I really saw the impact of my work at this scale—it was pretty exciting.
Email Campaigns
Before leading the charge on the Mastercard launch photography, I had already become more than acclimated with the PayPal brand through dozens of email campaigns, display ads, and the occasional icon design.
Usually it was pretty clear what to expect when working on a PayPal project. As an international brand, the brand guidelines were fairly robust and most work done by me and my peers fit snuggly into that framework—but I loved finding new ways to express the brand within those guidelines.
