Cloudinary Celebrates 3M Developers

Overview

To celebrate reaching 3 million developers, with in 15 months, Cloudinary wanted to create a campaign that recognized the scale and creativity of its developers community, the builders who make the web more visual every day.

As the lead art director, I was responsible for developing campaign concepts, art directing a junior designer on an alternate direction, and then bringing the chosen concept to life across multiple touchpoints, including the campaign landing page, social media graphics, animated testimonial videos, and digital ads.

Concept Development

I developed two visual directions that connected Cloudinary’s developer community to its core products, images and videos.

Concept 1: The Mosaic of Millions (Selected)

Cloudinary empowers millions of developers to create and manipulate visuals online. Each image is made up of unique pixels and each developer represents one of those building blocks that make Cloudinary what it is.

This concept used squares and gradients to symbolize individual developers coming together to form a larger, unified whole. The result was a visually rich “mosaic” that celebrated the collective creativity and diversity of Cloudinary’s global developer community. Additionally, the main mosaic reiterates the developer through the visual cue of a diamond (rotated square) showcase the familiarity of code brackets for developers.

Concept 2: Stories in a Square

Art directed a junior designer on this direction, which used a bento-style grid to showcase developer stories, stats, and milestones. This layout was bold and energetic, using each square to spotlight a different narrative while reinforcing the idea that every developer is a piece of something larger.

Execution

The Mosaic of Millions was selected for it's scale, color palette and connection to the developer community.

Once The Mosaic of Millions was chosen, I led the visual design for:

• Campaign landing page: Developed the page structure and visual system, ensuring design harmony between narrative content and dynamic visuals.
• Social graphics: Created modular templates adaptable for LinkedIn, Instagram, and X, maintaining consistency across static and motion assets.
• Animated testimonial videos: Designed and animated developer highlights that brought the “mosaic” theme to life through motion.
• Digital ads: Extended the visual language to paid media, emphasizing clear messaging and visual continuity across all placements.

Impact

The campaign successfully launched on Cloudinary’s blog and About page as well as Linkedin and Meta ads campaign, celebrating the global developer community that powers Cloudinary. It reinforced Cloudinary’s role as a visual-first platform built by and for developers — and turned a numerical milestone into a meaningful story of collective creativity.

Key Takeaways

• Developed a concept that visually and emotionally tied the developer community to Cloudinary’s product mission.
• Guided a junior designer through concept exploration and design iteration.
• Delivered a unified campaign system that translated seamlessly across web, social, and motion formats. This design language will further be explored for Cloudinary's Developer Brand.

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