Microsoft Back-to-School Campaigns

Role: Concepting, Art Direction, Visual Design

As an art director on the Campaigns team in the Store Studio at Microsoft, I worked alongside our creative director and senior art director to develop and build out Microsoft’s 2022 and 2023 Back-to-School campaigns. My responsibilities included ideation, hands-on digital design for a variety of channels (web, demand gen, social media, CRM, etc.), and leading and overseeing the development of a 100+ page toolkit, as well as countless creative assets that were distributed to a wide range of internal partners and 3rd-party stakeholders worldwide.

2022 Back-to-School

The inspiration for our creative for Microsoft’s 2022 Back-to-School campaign came from the ways in which tech supports individual learning styles and student expression. From these strategic insights, my team and I developed concepts that included colorful gradients, illustrative doodles, graph paper, and hand-drawn strokes that help tell the story of individual student journeys powered by technology. Additionally, our campaign photography was carefully curated to ensure it reflected a range of personalities and styles. 

Since the team included only myself, a senior visual designer, an editorial lead, and a creative director, it was all hands on deck at all times to ensure we built and delivered the campaign creative and toolkit to our partners across the globe on time. We were lean, but powerful. I’m very proud of our collaboration and what we accomplished together. We also received praise from our partners, who are the ones the toolkit is ultimately made for, with one partner stating, “The creative and toolkit worked well for both Northern and Southern Hemispheres and was visually interesting and flexible.”

2023 Back-to-School

The Back-to-School creative for the previous year was a solid, flexible, and expressive visual system. Because it was well-received by partners and stakeholders, for 2023 my team and I were asked to evolve the look, feel, and messaging rather than scrapping the concept and coming up with an entirely new campaign. Our creative approach was three-fold: communicate and celebrate positive human impact, elevate the concept to appeal to an older audience—primarily Gen Z—with a back-to-college feel, and finally, remove Covid/hybrid/virtual learning references and return to an energetic and fun back-to-school campaign.

We spent a few months collaborating in brainstorming and working sessions, as well as working with our partners from the Brand team to ensure we were aligning to Microsoft’s new palette and color strategy, as well as grounding our campaign in Microsoft’s creative principles. The outcome was a fresh look with very bold expression, aligning with what our target audience is drawn to, while still providing the flexibility our partners and 3rd-party vendors needed to implement the campaign successfully for their needs.

This was my favorite campaign to date, from a visual and career standpoint. Our incredibly talented team included myself, three senior visual designers, an editorial lead, sr. art director, and a creative director.