One of the most common projects I’d work on at Manning entailed weekly product sales that we would run. Each week, Manning would offer a new sale that would need graphics made for our website, Google display ads, and a variety of social platforms. Given that this was such a regular project, the biggest challenge came from introducing variety into each week’s sale. I would vary the colors and the illustrated characters used to create variety, but the most variety I feel I was able to create came from the typography. Sales that allowed for drastic size differences between important and unimportant text were perfect for creating dynamic, eye-catching ads.

We would also run special weekly sales that would introduce a new sale every day of the week, often with larger-than-average savings. To make these stand out, I took a different perspective on our standard layouts. I used an all-white background as a way to stand out from all typical graphics. From here, I introduced color-changing borders with flexible geometric elements around them. The tab reading “today only” in various spaces added variety without being difficult to locate or notice right away, and the semi-transparent interactions in the colorways added a layer of depth that made these graphics feel more advanced than our typical sales promotions.

During my time with Manning, there was a heavy push toward interactive learning elements and live events. As such, our sales team requested a sales sheet as a takeaway piece for potential partners. These pieces would discuss a variety of products and events to sponsor, including single books, surveys and reports, fully custom interactive liveBooks, and speaking events. Pages here ranged from data-dense infographics to text-heavy details on the various sponsorship packages, so keeping things well-organized and clear to viewers who will care about both data and their sponsorship terms was crucial.

For some time, Manning was internally planning a subscription service for their products. For a monthly fee, users would get access to a to-be-determined amount of learning material accessible from a subscription dashboard. They would have the ability to create their own learning paths from these materials (think playlists), explore and continue products they had previously been using, access products they owned separately from their subscriptions, and more.

Unfortunately, this offering never came to life, but I’m still very happy with how this dashboard turned out. There’s good hierarchy with thought put into what users will want to access most often, color-coding to reinforce position and uses of each module, and robust functionality included despite the early conception of the idea.

Often, sales members working with authors of liveProjects (Manning’s interactive learning courses) would request some diagrams to supplement specific sections of their material. This was a great way to be sure that any napkin sketches or crude drawings done in Microsoft Paint stayed professional and on-brand. It was obviously a great way to illustrate complex points for users, as well.