GIPHY STUDIOS
Art Direction + Creative Strategy
💬 THE Group Chat™
Group chats are where the internet is most honest.
It’s where people react in real time. It's messy, unfiltered, and emotional.
Inside jokes. Hot takes. Memes at 2am.
And increasingly, the language of those conversations is GIFs.
Millions of them.
Instead of interrupting culture with ads, we asked:
What if brands could participate in the conversation instead?
Design branded GIFs that behave like natural reactions inside group chats.
Not ads. Just emotionally expressive, conversational moments that people would actually send to their friends.
Working inside GIPHY Studios, I helped lead creative for branded GIF systems used across iMessage, Instagram, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Slack, and Twitter DMs.
Each animation was designed to function as:
• a reaction
• a mood
• a punchline
• or a visual exclamation point in conversation
By designing for how people actually communicate, brands could appear organically inside real conversations.
Not as interruptions, but as expressive tools people wanted to use.
Pure Leaf leaned into refreshment and reset moments,
the digital equivalent of taking a breath in a chaotic group chat.
Creative Grounded in real internet behavior.
Light, calming animations gave people a visual way to say:
"brb grabbing tea"
"this is refreshing"
"I need a break."
Spotify wanted to extend that conversation beyond the app and into the places where those reactions were actually happening.
Messaging.
Working with GIPHY Studios, we created a library of animated GIFs designed to amplify excitement around Spotify Wrapped 2024 and make it easier for fans to talk about it in real time.
Design shareable conversational reactions that people could drop directly into group chats.
Instead of static promotional assets, the goal was to create expressive moments that behaved like natural responses inside conversation threads.
The visual system built off Spotify’s 2024 Wrapped design language. The art direction leaned into the campaign’s core motif: hyperloops.
These kinetic graphic forms ricochet, bounce, and scale through space in vivid technicolor.
