Social Media Banners
As an ever changing product of the internet, cryptocurrency offers endless styles to play with. Unlike client work bound with strict rules, coming up with the SNS promotions for Cointelegraph Japan became some of my favorite work. I set up goals for a monthly rotation of social media banners for our website. Each month I poured new ideas into an almost square grid to come up with something fresh that readers would still instantly recognize as part of the Cointelegraph environment. By setting us apart from our more corporate competitors, the social media banners became memes among the Cointelegraph twitter community and offered a playful edge for the thousands of daily readers to our website.
The Challenge
With a large demographic that spans wall street traders and anti-government hackers alike, I had many approaches to consider. I wanted our material to feel local but retain that modern gloss of the tech world. Also considering Japanese culture, this meant bright colors and eye-catching fonts. From month to month I created a banner for each social media presence, using the same thematic style for each. This allowed a daily rotation for our landing page. Each banner was connected to the other, but provided enough difference from day to day. I also wanted them to act more as supports to the website structure itself. Instead of being blatant ads, I viewed them as pieces of art on our website walls. Something that wasn't distracting but pleasing to the eye, and could even function as snippets of the news or relevant information.
Perhaps my favorite idea was taking the logo for each SNS group (the bird for Twitter, a camera for instagram) and apply the realistic Cointelegraph style to them. Instead of adding a generic catch like, "Follow us on Twitter to stay up with the news," I added various quotes from famous people in the crypto scene. That way, the viewer was compelled to read the banner. With the acutal faded logos displayed in the background, the purpose of the banner still read clear once the viewer finished reading the text. It fulfilled my goal of engaging with our community at all levels, even in self promotion.