Shopee reflections — Saffren Choo

23.5.23 My last day at Shopee

It has been a year and a half since I joined the SG Graphic Design team at Shopee, and what a wild ride it has been!

I happened to chance upon the test submission that was required as part of the interview process and thought this something worth sharing. It is so humbling to look back on my growth as a creative in the 2D space, because... this is what I started with:

I didn’t even bother to remove the excess white background at the bottom.

Somehow, the folks at Shopee saw potential in me and gave me the opportunity to join the team, which I will always be grateful for.

The first few days on the job were challenging, and the Covid WFH restrictions were not helpful in this situation either. With my background in industrial design, I was really used to having a system “ideate ︎︎︎ strategise ︎︎︎ make” that I used for most of my projects (granted this is not the only method for ID but this was just something I got used to). I quickly realised when I was assigned 3 requests in a day that there was no time to think and I just had to launch Adobe Illustrator and make something.

Anyway, while we’re here I just thought I would share some of the work I did that made an impact in this journey.

My first submission:

This request will always be memorable to me.

I was assigned this request literally my second day on the job and I was trusted with a branding refresh for an entire microsite. This was indeed very eye opening as to see the team’s workflow and insight to how graphics were churned out so quickly and efficiently.

While daunting, I thought to myself, “this is no different than other design projects I have done”. I started off with my ideation process and started creating the graphics from scratch. After a good couple of hours of creating random shapes and trying to piece the whole key visual together, they still seemed plain and underwhelming. Until my supervisor passed me the working file from the previous microsite refresh so i could use some of the previous assets. It made sense that the graphics’ aesthetics remained uniform and still attractive to the consumer’s point of view.

At the time, this slightly disappointed me if I were to be honest because I realised that I would not be given as much creative reign as I had hoped. I think what threw me off the most would be that the system of the design process that I was used to when doing my school projects were not applicable at all.

Nonetheless, it was still meaningful to me once I saw my work launched on the website itself. I think it may still be viewable here: https://shopee.sg/m/home-living-bazaar-jan

Figma shenanigans:

There was a new initiative by one of the team members to expand our skillsets to Figma which expedited the process in creating visuals. This is mainly for weekly refreshes that mantains assets, but have updated titles and product SKUs.

So we took Figma classes and we each had a task to create Figma templates for different campaigns. I was assigned “Shopee Supermarket Everyday Low Prices”. I’m a fairly fast learner so I actually really enjoyed this challenge!

This came in really handy when as I fell in love with the 2D space and found myself more focused on media-based projects. I moved on to finding more interesting plugins for use and also learning more about the animations features in my own time and made cool presentations for my school. Thank you to my colleague for this push to pick this up.

More Stuff:

There was way more to do but I tried to pick the collaterals I enjoyed more and encompassed the nature of the work I did at Shopee well! It’s hard to choose when I had about 3 requests a day and I spent almost a year and a half there.

Oh and another thing was I loved helping out on the Games team. When I’m finished with my work I’ll lend a hand helping with small illustrations here and there, and sometimes they would entrust me with bigger projects! Here’s the work that I did for Shopee Pets.

I designed the pet clothing collaterals for Shopee Pets’ one year anniversary! Thus the birthday themed elements as requested from the marketing team. The collaterals had to be consistent for

There’s still so much to share about my Shopee experience. Initially I took on this internship in spite as a form of escape from school, but who knew that I would continue this internship through my final year as well.

Shopee has given me so much in terms of experience and connections that I value till this day. Besides the company perks of free gym sessions and an abundant pantry, my Shopee experience was really a fruitful and fultilling one, and I’m really sad to be leaving. Thank you to everyone part of this journey.