Square 50 Awards Campaign
- 1,331 Social Assets
- 3 Campaign Phases
- 18 Social Asset Sets
Square 50 was an annual awards campaign celebrating Square merchants — high-visibility, multi-phase, and global in scope, running across three campaign phases, a landing page, two sets of global emails, and eighteen social asset sets totalling 1,331 individual screens across eleven locales. There were two production designers to coordinate across all of it, and I was asked to lead.
I'd led production work before, just not at this scale. The step up wasn't really a question of capability so much as proportion — learning to hold more complexity at once without losing the thread of any of it.
The first consequential decision came early: how to handle the email builds. The team could do it manually, or we could use Taxi, a platform I'd worked with before and knew would handle this well. I recommended it.
That recommendation turned out to matter beyond the tool itself — it meant a colleague working remotely from London wouldn't lose time to manual email assembly, and it meant the team had a documented, repeatable process that would outlast the campaign. Onboarding everyone onto Taxi, getting a junior designer up to speed on After Effects for the GIF animations, producing the animations myself — all of it ran in parallel, building capacity in others while delivering the work.
The harder moment came mid-project, when a specific handoff gap made something clear: the social team and the web team had never worked directly with each other. Assets were being produced in one lane, the web implementation was happening in another, and no one had formally connected them. The gap hadn't caused a visible problem yet, but it was heading toward one.
I made the connection — setting up a shared handoff process between the two teams that hadn't existed before, which made the global rollout across eleven locales coherent. That working relationship outlasted the campaign.
Recommending Taxi was as much a people decision as a technical one — it was about protecting a colleague's time and building something the team could rely on after the campaign wrapped, not just solving for efficiency in the moment.
What the social/web connection reinforced was to look for the gaps that are heading toward failure, not just the ones that have already arrived there. On a project with this many moving parts, that kind of early reading is part of the work, and it tends to go unnoticed when it goes right.
“Thank you, Olivia, for expertly managing the numerous tasks and requests for Square 50. I appreciate how you handle feedback and updates with such ease and clarity. Your communication and regular updates are truly valuable!”
— Nicholas Dahl, Block
