Black Friday campaign
A sale for a brand whose whole personality is calm.
Wellness
Social Media Ads
Role
Visual Designer
Timeline
2 weeks
team
Individual Contributor
platform
Instagram, Facebook, Display
The Real Problem
Black Friday is loud by design. Big type, red badges, countdown clocks. night knight had just launched a website built on the opposite idea: deep colour, quiet layouts, a product that promises rest. The campaign had to sell a 44 percent discount and free shipping without undoing the brand the website had just established.
There was also a practical problem. One offer had to run across feed posts, stories, carousels, a save the date teaser, a sale day push and a set of horizontal banners, and every format needed to feel like one campaign.
Finding the Fix
I treated the offer as a headline inside the brand, not as a takeover of it. The night knight visual world stays exactly as it is on the site: the navy and violet gradients, the bottle in dark space, the relaxed lifestyle portraits. The sale is layered on top with a single bold line, the discount and the code, and nothing else.
Three principles held the set together:
One visual system, many formats. The same background, the same type scale, the same placement of the offer, so a story and a feed post are unmistakably siblings.
A phased message. "Save the date" first, then the sale, then a straight "44% off" push for the final hours. The visual stays constant while the urgency turns up.
Copy that sounds like the brand. "Tomorrow starts tonight" carries the campaign. The code FRIDAY44 and "free shipping" do the selling underneath it.
What Actually Happened
I started with the square feed post, because it is the format with the least room and the one most people see first. Once the offer, the product shot and the code sat comfortably in a 1:1 frame, the stories and carousels were adaptations rather than new designs.
The set that shipped covers three feed variants (product led, portrait led and gradient led), a story sequence for the teaser, the sale and the last call, a carousel that walks from headline to offer to product, and a row of wide banners for placements outside Instagram. Each piece was mocked up in its real context, in the feed and in the story tray, so the client approved what customers would actually see, not a flat artboard.
What Changed
night knight went into Black Friday with:
A full creative set across feed, story, carousel and banner formats
A three phase message that builds urgency without changing the look
Sale creative that still reads as night knight at a glance
Templates the team could reuse for the next promotion by swapping the offer
The campaign proved the brand system could carry a hard sell without losing its voice.
What I Had to Work With
The brand identity was only weeks old and could not be bent for a promotion.
The constraints shaped most of the decisions:
A discount led message in a category where price cuts can cheapen a premium product
Six formats with different safe zones, crops and text limits
Lifestyle photography that had to work in both square and vertical frames
A fixed sale window, which means the whole set has to be right the first time
One offer, one code, repeated across every piece without becoming wallpaper
What I'd Do Differently
I would design a short motion version of the hero post. The gradients and the bottle are made for a slow, subtle animation, and stories reward movement.
I would also push further on:
A post sale "thank you" and retention piece so the campaign does not end at the checkout
A user generated content frame, since reviews are the brand's strongest trust signal
Localised variants if the offer runs in more than one market
What I Learned
Design the smallest format first. Everything else is easier from there.
Urgency can come from sequence rather than volume. Three quiet posts in a row do the job of one loud one.