Automating 2 Weeks of Monthly Work at Shaw

Timeline
1 day
Role
Designer
Company
Shaw Communications
Demonstrates
Automation, Design Systems, UI

Automate a month of grunt work to get the team more strategic opportunities

The Challenge

Shaw’s design team was overburdened with repetitive production tasks like creating banners for Video On Demand releases and ad placements, consuming 1-2 weeks monthly and threatening our transition to a product-focused team. At risk of absorption by Marketing, we needed to free up capacity for high-value work like app development and conversion optimization. The immediate trigger: a week’s worth of banner production landed on my desk, following rigid but inconsistent patterns across buttons, icons, containers, and layouts.

Discovery & Prioritization

I audited workflows and team pain points, identifying repetitive Photoshop tasks as the biggest time sink. Prioritizing impact over perfection, I focused on automating banner production and codifying patterns into the organization’s first informal design system—shared Photoshop files on a drive—before terms like “design system” were common. This addressed both speed and consistency without external buy-in initially.

Shaw Video On Demand advertisement banners
A small snapshot of some of the variations of banners that needed to be made
hero-inglouriousbasterds-SG-dec29-2b
Shaw VOD promotional email featuring movie titles like Rio, Something Borrowed, and Mars Needs Moms with rental options

Solution & Execution

Automation Hack: Recorded Photoshop actions for batch processing banners. To bypass manual pauses, I rigged a banana with a sticky note to hold the spacebar—completing a week’s work in less than half a day.

Design System Creation: Cataloged reusable components in shared files:

  • Basics: Buttons, icons, text styles, price lockups.
  • Composites: Containers, ad placements, TV channel holders.
  • Layouts: Common VOD and promo templates.

Team adoption followed via demos and guidelines, emphasizing quality through reuse.

Outcomes & Impact

  • Banner production dropped from 1-2 weeks to 2-4 hours (~95% time savings).​
  • Day-to-day tasks reduced by up to 30%, unlocking time for product innovation like VOD conversion improvements.​
  • Team engagement rose as reviews shifted from pedantic fixes to strategic input; prevented Marketing takeover and positioned us as product leaders.
  • Personal recognition: Selected by peers for two awards.

This initiative proved small, bold actions create outsized leverage, influencing Shaw’s design maturity.