Product Launches

Apple

It was my honor to lead the worldwide Graphic Production teams for Apple Marcom for almost 4 years. During that time, I built scalable infrastructure, pioneered a culture of documentation, automated workflows and worked closely with engineering and design teams to share resources and refine processes – all of which would be adopted across all international locales. Below I have recalled images, some details and a link to the homepage for each of the product web sites that we built each year. For every project mentioned below, my team produced web, email, retail and banner ad assets. In addition to hardware products, we worked on all software products, event and campaign pages.

Design and Production Operations.
Digital Product Experiences.
Interactive.
TECHNICAL Workflows.
resource management.
Program Management.

2018 Product Launches

Every product launch at Apple had its unique challenges. Two sites that stand out in my memory from this year were the iPad Pro + Pencil and the iPhone XS sites.

iPad Pro + Pencil
There were two major challenges with this site: The users scroll through this site in a horizontal format vs the Apple standard vertical experience and the design featured little handwriting images Phil Schiller (and therefore we collectively) referred to as “snipes”.

Until that moment in 2018 we had been designing and building vertical experiences optimized for iPhones but the AD was keen to build an experience that would be spectacular on the priority product being launched, the refreshed iPad Pro. The interaction is a little weird on desktop and vertical tablet and mobile viewports but as beautiful as he imagined when viewed in a wide format. Everything was just a little quirky about this site and some of our best practices that had been developed for the standard vertical experience had to be reinvented for this horizontal format.

Like mentioned above the “snipes” were little custom handwritten accents featured through the product pages. Early on we investigated building a script for this hand writing but ultimately we designated one production designer responsible for producing all handwriting samples – globally. These assets were exported as images on the site, so each piece had to be updated in a file, re-exported and updated on the site when there was a change (and there was endless noodling) and then sent through the same process for each geo. Her life was a little crazy for the three month period leading up to that launch.

Some other issues that required special attention were:

Products had to be lit differently when photographed because shadows were cast to the right vs down.
The page had to be responsive based on height (vs the width) of page.
Extra wide compositions had to be produced in pieces. Not an unusual practice but weirdly trickier to get the horizontal pieces to line up vs vertical.
Parallaxing behaves differently in a horizontal format.

Because every site built for apple.com is bespoke every product page has unique challenges similar to those mentioned above. I haven’t gone into detail on any of the other pages that my team worked on during this 4 year window but I am happy to chat through any and all!

Other products that launched in 2018: