Supporting email marketing.
Cogo Labs
My experience designing, developing, and shipping 3 microsites that contributed to the success of 10+ email marketing campaigns and raised funds to support 5 successful start-ups.
At Cogo Labs, compartment sites are used to support email marketing, and to gather data on user behavior. I was responsible for designing, coding, and hosting 3 responsive sites.
Timeline 1 week per site (3 weeks total)
Tools Atom, Sketch
Role Web Designer
What is Cogo Labs?
Cogo Labs’ mission is to provide anything that helps an internet startup grow quickly and efficiently. The incubator identifies business opportunities in certain markets by running internal experiments on consumer trends. Using this data, portfolio companies are grown to profitability, and launched into the world.
The Task
In order to gather user behavior data in different markets, Cogo’s Data Analytics teams run experiments with various email templates and compartment sites. My responsibilities as a designer included supporting these teams and campaigns by developing these sites from scratch.
Given only the name of the compartments and the copy, I had to design logos and branding schemes based on the type of users the email marketing campaigns were targeting.
Beli – corporate, professional
Starfell – scientific, insightful
Flicker – lively, lighthearted
Before I began coding each webpage, I created a mockup on Sketch. This helped me conceptualize how to organize my HTML, and prevent redundancy in my CSS styling.
For compliance reasons, the actual content of the sites I worked on have been replaced with dummy text.
DESIGN SOLUTION
Beli
This website was used for an email marketing campaign targeted towards corporate professionals– the content was relevant to people who work in business related fields. I used a dark color scheme to create a sleek, modern feel for the Beli brand. I muted the colors in the hero image to further emphasize the bright blue pop of color.
Starfell
The Starfell site was used in a campaign that sent out science related news. I created a galaxy themed branding by using a looping video of a starry night sky as the hero image, and incorporating colors inspired by outer space. To better present a list of information, I displayed each piece of information alongside a relevant icon.
Flicker
The content of this site was lighthearted and casual, so I decided to create a fun and quirky compartment site. Playing off of the name of the compartment itself, I experimented with CSS animation to mimic flickering neon signs. The final campaign product had a retro theme, and was targeting towards a younger audience.
Impact
3
Compartment sites shipped
10+
Email marketing campaigns run
5
Successful startups supported
By providing design support to our Data Analytics teams, I contributed to the success of over 10 email marketing campaigns. My designs were viewed by thousands of recipients, and helped increase revenue brought into the company.
Without this income from email marketing, Cogo would not have the funds to incubate and launch over 5 successful start-ups. My contributions throughout the summer had a direct impact on company profit.
Learning Takeaways
My summer at Cogo was very memorable– I received stellar mentorship and worked on a wide range of design tasks. I learned a lot about how to work with other designers, as well as engineers, to create useful tools. I was able to grow in multiple areas by conducting user interviews, designing logos, and experimenting with code. After working at Cogo, I feel well prepared for the next stage of my design career.
