Hailey Sarnecki
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Graphic Designer
MY TIME @ HEXAGRAMM BOOKS
I began working at Hexagramm Books as their In-House Graphic Designer in March, 2021. I started part-time while finishing up college, then transitioned to full-time once I graduated. Hexagramm Books is a small company that sells high-quality books in curated collections to teachers that are available in Spanish, French and English. The books sold are never translated, and are always written by native speakers, which is what sets us apart from other book sellers.
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While at Hexagramm, I worked on creating catalogs in InDesign to display our products and was able to get the company to switch from print to digital to save money and have the ability to edit the catalogs if any of our stock changes throughout the year. When I wasn't working on the catalogs, I helped out with emails, creating their banners, vector icons and graphics through Illustrator. Some of our emails promoted blog posts written by our owner, so I would help create the graphics for the blogs, as well as create handouts that were linked for the teachers' use. I created the banners that are displayed on the website, as well as some graphics and landing pages. Some of the book publishers gave us permission to use their inner illustrations, so I had the opportunity to incorporate those in some designs. I created gifs and edited videos through After Effects that go on our site and our YouTube page and edited any photos of product/staff through Photoshop that would be featured on our site or in emails. To add a little more diversity to the graphics, I worked with watercolor to help fit themes for emails.
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Within Hexagramm, there is another small business, Just Good Teaching. This business is where teachers can sign up for educational webinars and blog posts that gives them advice and tips on teaching their students dual language. I revised and updated many presentations within Google Slides to make them much more engaging for the teachers, since they were lecture heavy. I also had created a Presentation that held all of the slide themes, so the presentation can be edited by others in the future easily.
When creating the graphics, I would keep in mind that the designs should be simplified so they can be recreated easily for teachers to use. I stuck with vector drawings for most, but would occasionally add in watercolor where it felt appropriate.
Along with the presentations, I would create handouts that went along with the content and share them as PDFs so they could be printed and copied by teachers. The branding for Just Good Teaching had already existed when I started working.
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To see more of my work, check out their websites linked above by clicking on the logos.
CATALOGS
Catalogs are the biggest way we sell product at Hexagramm. Since I was able to switch us from print to digital using Flipsnack, that gave us the opportunity to link our newest catalogs to emails we sent out. Since March of 2021, I have created and launched 6 separate catalogs, the largest being 76 total pages. The key for the catalogs was being able to showcase the titles within each collection, and not making it all about buying our products. I would create what we call clusters where the collection would have all of its books playfully scattered, while allowing the covers to still be seen. I would use inner illustrations from publishers that gave us permission and create other graphics to make the information more enjoyable to read. The catalogs would always have a table of some sort showing the name of the collections, how many books come in each one, their product code for easy look-up on our site and their pricing.
I made sure that every catalog was created with attention to detail and many rounds of edits. I always made sure it lined up with our brand identity (created before I began working here) and made sure all of the information was displayed in a way that would make ordering books from our company a very easy and stressless experience for teachers and schools. ​
All of the catalog covers I've designed.
A small look inside the 2021-22 Catalog
WEBSITE GRAPHICS
Our website is the main place for us to receive our orders. Every piece of marketing material will lead our clients here, so the goal was to make our home page welcoming by added colorful banners to show what promotions/new things are coming up with Hexagramm. Every time a new catalog or a new sale is released, I would create a banner for our home page carousel to pull engagement. I'd create graphics, use inner illustrations from titles within the catalog or that are part of the sale and even use the titles that had the most appealing covers. The same technique would be used for our landing pages as well, just with some titles so it's more to the point.​
Views of our home and landing pages.
EMAIL BANNERS
For every email that goes out, we lead with an eye-catching email banner. This was one of my favorite things to work on, I loved being able to experiment with other colors outside of the brand's colors. For the banners, I would mostly stick with graphics I created and would pair those with inner illustrations, depending on what the content of the email was. We made sure to switch the content up as often as we could, so every email wasn't just about us gaining sales.
A few of my favorite email banners.
GIFS/VIDEOS
For some of our emails, I'd create gifs to help the content stand out and to show importance. It's a fun little way to keep the reader engaged and it helped me brush up on my gif-making skills. For our branch, Just Good Teaching (JGT), I'd edit a lot of the webinar videos and would add graphics and text to highlight key points of the videos. The Latest Lists video below was created for an email campaign to show that we have plenty of stock that is ready to ship.
Examples of gifs and a video that are featured in emails.
DIGITAL/TRADITIONAL ILLUSTRATIONS
The majority of the graphics I created would go into our emails. While having vector illustrations and icons is appealing and practical, I thought that adding a traditional element would be a great addition to add diversity to our look. I stuck with watercolor paintings that I would sketch, paint and scan in to edit and adjust in Photoshop. Watercolor felt like an appropriate medium because of the softness of this brand and its aim to help teachers and students.
Some of the graphics I've created.
This is one of the largest projects I worked on during my time at Hexagramm. Conserving Georgia Wildlife is a digital book that was written by the owner, Marie Bouteillon, and put together and illustrated by me. This book took many months to create and went under many edits. It is currently being used by Gwinnett County schools to teach third graders science and social studies in Spanish while following Common Core Standards. Our process started with a lot of research and collaboration, along with rough sketches to visualize what fits with each section.
For the illustrations, I understood that these drawings were meant to be for a young audience. I switched up the styles and varieties to make them fun and light, while still remaining accurate and fitting the tone of each section. The illustrations took 30+ hours to complete and are a huge part of this book, to help the students visualize what they are reading and learning. Not only are there illustrations of accurate maps and animals, but there are fact and key word boxes every few pages to engage and test the students.
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Collaborating and being able to create a book that is not only being read, but a book that is helping students learn with material that wasn't available to them before, is very satisfying. This project was definitely difficult, but I gladly accepted this challenge and was able to create something very helpful and inspiring.
A page of my sketchbook.
Some illustrations.
Small look inside the book.
To view the blog post I was featured in talking more about this book, or to see more of the book itself, I have them linked down below where they are published on the site. While you're on the site, take a look around and see if there are any books you may be interested in too ;-)
*All work displayed has already been published on our website, in blog posts and in email campaigns. Permission to use this content was granted September 12, 2022 by owner and Chief Innovation Officer, Marie Bouteillon.*