Interning for Citrine Natural Beauty Bar has given me an insight on what working as an in house designer is like. Working closely with the head of marketing who oversees performance rates, click rates, and overall sales is extremely helpful to know which designs of mine are successful compared to others. I mainly focus on graphics for Pinterest Pins, Instagram posts and stories, and automated email campaigns.

Instagram Story Post

Knowing the brand in and out is extremely important to be a successful in house designer. Citrine carries many different clean beauty brands that I had to learn about. Knowing the difference in products in key to be able to make high performing graphics. I do not receive copy from marketing, so I play the role of a copywriter and graphic designer in this position.

Instagram Grid Post

Since Citrine is a clean and natural beauty brand, it is important that I keep my designs clean to resemble the brand well. So, when I am assigned to do more informational posts like this one, I have to make the post feel clear and airy regardless of the heavy amount of information.

Pinterest Posts

The social media intern and I collaborate for the Pinterest and she posts some days and I post other days. I have never done Pinterest Pins before so I had to research the best wording to use, what hashtags to use, and what time to post for the best performance rates. I started a “Top Clean Swaps” Campaign and research popular makeup and skincare products, do an ingredient analysis on them to see their toxic ingredients, and find a similar clean product that we carry in store to feature. Even though the graphics are extremely simple, there is a hefty amount of work and research behind them.

The Analytics

I learned that there every ad that you receive on Instagram, every promotional email you receive, ect. always has intent. So typically, the head of marketing will tell me which products we are getting new stock in, which sales are down, and which will help reach us meet our monthly sales goals, and I will promote those in my graphics.

Brand Guide

Since the main graphic designer for Citrine works remotely from California and only works during the night, there is very little collaboration between the two of us. However, it is important that all of our posts stay consistent between the two of us, so I decided to make a brand guide. When I came in to Citrine, I was just told that the colors were black and white and the typefaces were Didot and Work Sans, but there were little guidelines besides that. So, I researched acceptable sizes for each type of media, and made a guideline based off of that.