Promotional Brand
Extension Design
Designing brand-forward concepts across digital experiences, retail moments, and promotional touchpoints, extending Tarte’s identity into every corner of the customer journey.
Role
Digital Creative Intern
Tarte Cosmetics
Timeline
Fall 2025
12 Weeks
Scope
Digital · Retail · Packaging ·
Logo Design
Overview
Tarte’s brand doesn’t stop at products, it lives in every promotional moment, digital interaction, and retail touchpoint. Alongside production asset work, I contributed to a range of concept-driven design projects: spin-to-win website overlays, e-gift card designs, retail gondola signage, social campaign logos, and product packaging explorations.
Each project translated Tarte’s playful, feminine identity into a specific use case, balancing brand consistency with creative expression.
Objectives
A fast-moving beauty brand like Tarte requires constant creative exploration, not just for campaigns, but for the smaller moments that shape how customers experience the brand daily. The challenge across these projects was designing assets that feel unmistakably Tarte while serving distinct functional goals across digital, social, and retail environments.
Develop interactive web concepts that drive email and SMS sign-ups without feeling transactional
Elevate functional digital assets into genuine branded moments
Create retail-ready signage that communicates clearly and has personality even at a quick glance
Explore packaging directions that extend Tarte’s identity into physical product experiences
Process
Overall Research + InsightsReviewed Tarte’s previous executions for each asset type before designing , to better understand what existed prior, and helped me identify where there was room to push creatively vs. where brand consistency needed to hold
Studied competitive beauty brands to understand how the category handles digital gifting, interactive web moments, and retail signage
Used Pinterest curation to define visual territories for each project individually, each asset type had its own reference board rather than one catch-all direction
IdeationEach project began with a clear brief and a defined functional goal, which shaped the creative direction from the start. For the spin-to-win overlays and e-gift cards, I reviewed Tarte’s existing versions first (on the left), then explored multiple visual variations, testing color, typography, background imagery, and layout configurations before narrowing to strongest directions.
For the Mystery Charm and All Access logos, ideation centered on typographic exploration: testing how different lockups communicated hierarchy, personality, and scalability across formats.
The SolutionA suite of brand-forward design concepts spanning five distinct promotional touchpoints, each grounded in Tarte’s visual identity and built to serve a specific functional goal. From the interactive energy of the spin-to-win overlays to the giftable storytelling of the birthday bundle, these projects collectively demonstrate how a brand’s identity can respond across wildly different contexts without losing what makes it recognizable.
Though not every concept moved into production, each one contributed to internal creative alignment and strengthened my ability to design within a real brand system under real constraints.
Design DevelopmentSpin-to-Win Wheel Website Overlays: Explored variations across three visual directions: bold and graphic, soft and editorial, and product-forward. Refined based on feedback toward designs that balanced conversion-driven UX with the fun, brand-forward visual moment Tarte needed.
E-Gift Cards: Developed image-led designs that showcased Tarte’s personality across multiple seasonal and lifestyle directions. Focused on making a functional asset feel expressive and elevated across email, mobile, and checkout contexts.
"Free Mystery Charm" Gondola Logo: Designed for high-visibility retail display: legibility from a distance, playful charm-inspired typography, and integration of Tarte’s official charm assets for brand consistency.
"All Access" Social Campaign Logo: Explored multiple typographic lockups and hierarchy configurations to test how the concept could scale across social formats while remaining clear and on-brand.
Packaging Explorations: Developed mascara cap pattern concepts and a limited-edition founder birthday bundle (mascara, lip plumper, freckle stamper) envisioned as a cohesive, giftable set.
Outcomes + Metrics
5 distinct promotional asset categories designed across digital, social, and retail environments
Concepts developed for immediate internal use and presented to the brand marketing and creative teams
Birthday bundle and mascara cap explorations contributed to internal packaging ideation conversations
Work strengthened Tarte’s internal visual library for future promotional references and ideas
Key Takeaways
Functional assets are brand assets. For example, a spin-to-win wheel or an e-gift card is never just a utility; it’s a branded moment to engage your audience
Designing for range within a system requires knowing where the guardrails are before you push against them, the best explorations happened after deeply studying what Tarte had already done
Not every concept that doesn’t launch is a failed concept. As the birthday bundle may not have gone to production, it sharpened my instinct for designing within real-world business constraints