Social Marketing
A high-volume, multi-channel production operation delivering thousands of assets annually across paid social and digital advertising.
Type:
Production Design
Role:
Lead Designer and Builder
Team:
Antek Krystecki, Steven Chi
Tools:
Figma
PROBLEM
Global Scale. Two People. No Room for Error.
Square's Demand Generation team was responsible for producing thousands of assets every year across three paid channels: Meta, Native, and Apple Search Ads, reaching over 300 million potential sellers globally. The production team was two people. Campaigns ran continuously, locales multiplied, and the asset list grew with every new market and product line.
The challenge was not any single campaign. It was sustaining that output indefinitely, without sacrificing quality or burning out the team. Every workflow decision had to scale. Every template had to carry more weight. And when something broke, there was no buffer; it broke in production.
01
4,373+ assets produced annually
Across Meta, Native, and Apple Search Ads, all running simultaneously on a fixed weekly cadence.
02
Two designers, global reach
The entire operation ran on two people. Every brief, every revision, every export, with no production team behind them.
03
Localization across multiple markets
Every campaign required size, copy, and locale variants. Manual localization was the biggest time sink in the workflow.
SOLUTION
A System Designed to Absorb Anything
The answer was a set of interlocking systems: a fixed-cadence batch workflow, channel-specific Figma templates, and eventually a custom-built tool to automate the most painful part of the process. Each piece solved a specific problem, and together they made the output sustainable at global scale.
BATCH SYSTEM
A Fixed-Cadence Workflow for High-Volume Work
The batch system was the right answer because it matched the nature of the work. Most campaign requests were not creative problems; they were production problems. Known formats, known templates, known copy. The only variable was time. By building a fixed-cadence workflow with standardized review steps and a single predictable delivery date, the team could absorb high volumes without treating every request as an emergency. Briefs submitted by deadline were batched together, processed through a scheduled review, and delivered as a complete set. Nothing slipped through and nothing jumped the queue.
META ADS
300 Million Potential Sellers. Every Year.
Meta was DG's primary paid social channel for new seller acquisition, reaching approximately 300 million potential sellers annually across In-Feed, Instagram Stories, and Reels. A combination of strategic creative, optimized production templates, and precise audience targeting drove both prospecting and retargeting at scale.
Production ran on a Figma template batch process. Templates with designated zones for copy and images allowed rapid content flow with minimal manual intervention, enabling a small team to maintain exceptional output volume. Built-in flexibility supported A/B testing of image treatments and copy approaches while preserving brand consistency. As performance data came in, templates were continuously refined in collaboration with strategy and channel teams.
HIGHLIGHT
Beyond the Batch: Bespoke Creative
Select campaigns used a more collaborative bespoke approach, bringing creative, copy, and production together to work in tandem. This process developed new templates and layouts that excelled visually, narratively, and functionally, keeping the team ahead of evolving social trends and giving channel teams something to test against the batch baseline.
NATIVE ADS
Seamless Placements. Full-Funnel Coverage.
Native advertising reached prospective sellers through prospecting and retargeting, appearing as seamless article thumbnails within website content. Positioned alongside relevant editorial content, the format ran consistently across desktop, mobile, tablet, and app, providing comprehensive coverage throughout the customer journey.
HIGHLIGHT
Catching a Cropping Issue in Production
Despite months of active deployment, a member of my team noticed our ads were being poorly cropped in real-world contexts. I worked directly with strategy and channel managers to investigate, ultimately finding we had misinterpreted the ad safety specifications.
Publishers are permitted to scale images down without altering aspect ratio, and may apply symmetric cropping of up to 20% in a single dimension. With this clarified, we developed a revised layout that preserved the original creative intent while ensuring proper display within the actual safety parameters.
APPLE SEARCH ADS
Capturing Intent at the Moment of Search
Apple Search Ads placed Square in front of users actively searching the App Store through exact, broad, and search match keywords. Expanded placements on the Today and Search tabs, plus Custom Product Pages, allowed tailored experiences for different audience segments, driving more relevant conversions at the moment of intent.
HIGHLIGHT
MTRX: From Hours to Minutes
BUILDING MTRX
Apple Search Ads required adaptation across multiple sizes, devices, and locales. Manually inserting localized copy was tedious and time-consuming. Using AI tools, I built a custom Figma plugin paired with a Google Sheets script template that transformed the workflow entirely. MTRX enables localized copy to be automatically populated into a component matrix within Figma, connecting directly to layouts with pre-configured text styling. Production designers can now implement copy from source documents in minutes rather than hours.
RESULTS
Production at Scale. Delivered Without Disruption.
What this operation proved is that scale and quality are not opposites. A well-designed system, a tight team, and a close relationship with strategy meant we could move fast without cutting corners. The work I am most proud of is not any single asset. It is the infrastructure that made thousands of them possible.
WHAT I LEARNED
The Infrastructure Is the Work
Running a high-volume production operation for two years taught me something that is hard to learn any other way: the invisible work is the most important work. The templates nobody sees. The naming conventions nobody asks about. The batch calendar that keeps everything predictable. These are not glamorous things to build, but they are what made everything else possible.
I also learned that system design and creative quality are not in tension. The batch process and the locked templates did not constrain the work, they freed up the cognitive bandwidth to focus on what actually moved performance: the image treatment, the copy angle, the layout decision that made one ad outperform another. When the logistics run themselves, you can actually think about the work.
WHERE THIS GOES NEXT
Quarterly template reviews driven by testing data, using performance signals to push bolder creative decisions within the real constraints of each channel's specs and safety zones.
A smoother Google Sheets integration that removes the translation step between copy docs and Figma layouts, so briefs feed directly into production.
A fundamental shift in testing volume. The assumption was that creative was the blocker. In reality the problem was thinking in low volumes. Building systems designed for high-volume testing from the start, rather than retrofitting scale later, would have unlocked performance gains much earlier.