Forging Stronger Relationships while Social Distancing — Shopee Design Virtual Team Bonding
By: Shopee Design
Tags: Behind The Scenes, Team Building, Design, Teamwork, Illustration

The two posters depict Shopee designer’s eureka moments before and after conceiving an idea. Where the designer sits is shaped like a question mark when she is deep in thoughts. Upon achieving eureka, however, she then leaps out of her seat, and it changes to an exclamation point.

The most exciting and fulfilling times in Shopee as a designer, for me, is when creating the right design solutions to the problems raised. It feels like overcoming a challenge that no one has ever done before. Hence, I wanted to portray that ‘ah-hah!’ moment as truthfully as I could.

I deliberately omitted descriptions from the poster to leave the audience with a sense of curiosity of wanting to find out the meaning behind the illustration. I really enjoyed listening to all the different views that people had after seeing the design.

This activity has really brought us closer together despite the social distancing regulations. With just a simple exercise, it had us gathering around, guessing and sharing ideas with one another. The shared views brought us more inspirations for future poster designs, and we look forward to designing more!

Team 4

As soon as we received the assignment, we held a meeting to brainstorm ideas together. Our team lead settled on the theme ‘We Are One’. Meaning to say we, as team members, are one and the same, using the same five senses to perceive, judge, make decisions, and act.

For me, though, I think while everyone is part of a whole, they have their own souls and personal wills. Maintaining this diversity gives the team more creativity and vitality, enabling us to support many complicated and unpredictable tasks in our daily work. That was how we created the man in this poster; his every feature was carefully designed and uniquely coloured to reflect the different personalities of each team member.

Each piece of paper represents a team member. When stacked together, they form a more significant, multi-faceted person made up of many smaller individuals. Then, using Figma’s pen tool, I gave this man an arm to represent myself as part of this team.

Team 5

My work is presented in a flat illustration style depicting the local fast food cuisine of Vietnam. I was mostly inspired by my business trip to Vietnam, where I came across a lot of local snacks that were new to me. I recorded some of them on my camera, and upon returning to Singapore, I referred to some images online to complete this illustration.

I think Southeast Asia has a lot of fun places to visit. The food in each area often connects us to fond memories. Hence, I wanted to use food to evoke interest in the local culture. This activity has reawakened my passion for drawing and gave me a great sense of vitality. Instead of repeating the work that I do daily to realise someone else’s ideas, I was able to express mine through illustrations. It not only helped me but also allowed more people to learn about our team’s work.

Although the illustration was presented as a poster, it can also be used in the team’s work on app design, for example, as an empty page illustration.

Team 6

This poster illustrates all the rare gems one can find in Singapore. Since COVID-19 has halted our travel plans, it forced us to take a step back and see the world through new eyes. This made us realise just how beautiful and incredible Singapore is, and we wanted to tell that story through Shopee’s perspective. Therefore, we designed the poster using bespoke illustrations we created for our branding project.

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