Product Designer
The Walt Disney Company
2010 – 2015 · Budapest
I joined the Budapest branch of Disney in early 2010. There were around nine of us on the design team. We looked after the European Disney websites for the countries that didn't have their own designer. A few of the bigger markets had someone in-house, the UK, France, Spain and Germany, but everywhere else the sites were ours to keep running.
The work ran off a schedule of whatever was coming next, a new film, a series, a game, some event at the parks. The US sent us the raw material, the character cutouts, the backgrounds, the logos, and we built the banners each site needed out of it, in all the placements and sizes the pages used. Then the same set had to be made again for every language the campaign ran in. A pack wasn't done until every size existed and every localised logo and every bit of localised text was sitting on it correctly. One film could turn into dozens of finished files, the same artwork built out again and again across sizes and languages. That was most of the job.
We divided the work by IP rather than by country. One person would get an Iron Man film, someone else an animated release, someone else a parks event, and they'd produce the whole localised set for it. Since we worked as a pool, whoever had a gap would also pick up the brand-checking work. That meant going over things partners had made, cinema posters for the films, licensed clothing and merchandise, and checking them against Disney's guidelines, and being on hand to run a brand session if a partner needed walking through it. The guidelines were strict and left very little open, down to the colours, the fonts and the spacing, and a lot of the job was keeping to them exactly, on our own work and on everyone else's.
Over the five years I was there the whole thing changed underneath us. When I started the sites were part Flash, part HTML, with the text burned straight into the images, which is why every language needed its own flattened version. By 2013 or 2014 the Flash was gone, the sites had moved to responsive HTML5, and the content ran from the CMS instead of being baked into the artwork. I stayed on the design side the whole time and never touched the code, but I watched the shift arrive. It was also what finished the team. Once the images came through ready from the US and only the text needed localising, the code did the rest, and a design team of nine wasn't something the work needed anymore. Disney dissolved it in 2015, and that was when I left.