Cointelegraph New Year's Special
The start of the new year is one of the biggest holidays in Japan. It would also be an anniversary to mark our team's first year working on the Cointelegraph Japan website. To celebrate we wanted to run our largest feature yet: a dedicated page with 50 exclusive interviews between some of the most famous leaders in the cryptocurrency space. We just completed a huge Christmas campaign on twitter and wanted to keep the festive vibe going with our readers. On my part, it would take designing not only the usual header illustration, but the whole page layout, interactions, and 50 portraits for each of the interviews!
The Challenge
The phrase "timing is key" played a significant role in this project. Working with developers in a seven-hour-difference time zone meant that all planning had to be clearly laid out. I also needed to coordinate receiving the 50 headshots from interviewees in enough time to draw them all. This was the greatest challenge to improve my drawing skill. By the end I cut the time it took to finish a portrait in half. The overall color scheme of the page was taken from colors to match with the Cointelegraph brand, but with a checkered pattern and gold twist to match Japanese New Year decor. Without a dedicate spot to distinguish this from our daily articles, we needed a design to visually stand out on our page as a specific New Year's special.
In the end the article was a total success and brought the largest amount of traffic Cointelegraph Japan had ever seen. After just three months there were almost a quarter million views on the page. There were definitely long weeks of nonstop work to complete it on time, but seeing the readers and interviewees reactions made it worth all the effort. I leveled up not just my own drawing skills, but learned proper timing and communication lessons that will stick with me on future month long projects.