When I started on retail in 2015 the industry standard software for this sort of work was Photoshop, which was painful. Every offer had to be laid out by hand in hundreds of different iterations by a team of 6 creatives. Every update took hours to complete, and we spent many, many long nights in the office.

Over the years our team was paired down to 4, then 3. We transitioned to Sketch as soon as the Beta version was available, then later experimented with XD. This alleviated some, but not all, pain points. Several vendors, and clients, encouraged us to move to a less hands-on templated design system but I was unwilling to give up creative control to an algorithm. With so many moving parts and constantly evolving offers it’s important to maintain the freedom to break a template if it means delivering a more successful asset, and ultimately only a human with good design sense can make that call. 

In late 2023 we got approval to move to Figma. I spent our Christmas break and any free moments through early 2024 making- and breaking- systems to test this new program. I knew it was going to be complicated, but I wanted to create a workflow that would cut down on opportunities for transcription errors, and which would make updates a breeze for our small team.

It worked! I designed an extensive library of components that we use as basic templates across all assets. Instances of these can be detached, updated for specific offers, then inserted into placeholder components that cascade across all of our different templates for export.

Now when we need to make an update, we can make those chances in a single place, then all we need to do is re-export anything that was affected. We’ve become faster, more efficient, more accurate, and much less chronically stressed as a result.