Global Art Program

The Global Art Program is an ongoing effort to offer authentic and localized artwork in Facebook App designed for and by the communities we serve around the world.

The program is run and designed by my creative partner, Ali Burnett, and I. Now having run this program for several years, a few things have stayed the same:

Hire as many artists as you can, and let ‘em shine
Localization Teams in every market are our besties
Cultural context is everything

Design Principles

Authenticity

Localization is everything. The work needs to feel native. That’s why we hired artists all around the world to bring this project to life through their eyes.
Transcreation, not translation

Transcreation means instead of asking artists to interpret “yum” into their local language, we ask what they would say when they are excited to dig into their meal.
Expressive quality

The key to designing stickers is giving people something that will help them express themselves. Stickers in this context need to avoid being purely decorative to give people real value.

Focus Areas

Evergreen Content

Everyday sentiments in the top local language help locals express their daily lives in stories.
Holiday Content

Holiday art reflects local traditions and styles during the most important holidays.
City-Specific

We know that sharing location is a top sharing-use case, so we made city-specific art to help people express that in a richer more expressive way.

The project that went around the world.

Designing for authenticity and local personality can be challenging when you haven’t so much as stepped foot in some of these places. I designed a very rigorous process to include the right stakeholders and resources to ensure the work would resonate with communities around the world.

Research

Visual cultural research done by local artists helps set the stage and ground the project. Artists are asked to craft a visual trend report on a how their daily life looks and feels, and how their culture connects with some of the top-shared sentiments on Facebook, like family, love, friends, and food.

The artist visual trend work is then vetted by and supplemented by the local insights teams in each market to ensure cultural accuracy.

2. Sketch Explorations

I love this part! Sketch round is a time for artists to go wide with their explorations. Their only constraint is to think about expressions that resonate with our top categories for sharing on Facebook.

At this stage, my role as an art director is to preserve the artist’s intention while balancing product goals and best practices like legibility.

3. Color Development

Color round is when things really start to come together. From here, it’s just about honing in on those last tiny craft details to perfect the final product before launch.

All review groups including localization managers, language managers, policy and legal folks have been reviewing the work along the way, and now is the time for their final sign-off.