We don’t know if you’d noticed, but Christmas is nearly here!

At this time of year, many companies want to send out some sort of Christmas message to their clients. Christmas cards are all very well, but perhaps not very cutting edge, and when your clientele is based all over the world, not very practical either.

Our lovely client Mergermarket (we’ve mentioned them before) came to us with this exact quandary - how to create something beyond a basic ‘Merry Christmas’ email that could be sent out to their wide range of clients around the world.

It had to be something memorable, something bespoke, something that briefly showcased all of their varied product brands and all tied together with a look that was distinctly ‘Christmas’ without being too overtly Christian (unfortunately, that meant even Santa had to go).

With limited time and budget, we had to create something distinct that acted as a digital christmas card. It needed to work on a wide range of browsers and devices, but couldn’t be too complex when it came to development resources (as our team are all busy working away on the new Mergermarket website - more news on that next year!).

So the N3RD design team decided to take this upon themselves – and got creative!

We’ve been investigating the use of tools beyond Photoshop in order to create more interactive prototypes, one such tool is Adobe’s Muse.

Billed as a full website creator (‘no coding necessary’), we’ve been investigating it’s strengths and weaknesses as a design tool. Whilst it does offer some great features (especially when it comes to parallax scrolling effects) it’s not great at more complex website builds. However as a tool to create unique microsites and landing pages, it’s actually pretty impressive - and this is the tool we ended up using to create a simple parallax scrolling page for Mergermarket’s Christmas message.

Whilst it doesn’t handle fully responsive page layouts, it does allow you to create multiple versions of the same page targeted at tablet and mobile. Whilst this is not usually the best approach when creating a full website, the advantage in this case is that we can tailor the level of images / effects for the target device - so whilst desktops get the full effect, we’ve actually recompressed the images and dropped some of the effects for the mobile version so it performs better on smaller screens.

You can see the final ‘scroller’ here: christmas.mergermarketgroup.com

To direct people there, we also created a simple ‘call to action’ HTML email - designed in Photoshop and then re-created within their email system of choice ‘Dotmailer’. The email has been sent out to over 80,000 people around the world, with over 26,000 page views (so far).

If you’d like any innovative marketing solutions (digital or otherwise) to kick start your new year communications, just give us a call!