🎄 A Designer’s Christmas magic
Denis Bozhinoski December 07, 2025
It started out as just another project, but there was a special Christmas magic about the project itself that affects on us.
A holiday campaign with a tight deadline, a demanding client, and too many results for the last month of the year.
Our design team gathered around a long white table, half-tired, covered in sketches, color palettes, and half-finished mockups.
What was our task this year?
“Design a Christmas experience for our users—something warm, unforgettable, truly magical.”
But at first it was just ordinary, and we needed to make it magical.
It felt like work with joy and like another December where creativity struggled with exhaustion.
01
Designing & Feeling
We started with Christmas joy. Red and gold gradients, snow effects, soft animations, cozy typography. But somehow the screens didn’t look quite as magical as we had imagined.
Angela kept saying, “It’s beautiful, but it feels like there’s something missing to make it feel Christmas.”
Anthony, our UX lead, stared at the wireframes and sighed,
“Maybe we’re designing too much detail and feeling too little.”
We all laughed—but we knew he was right. We were designing Christmas without actually experiencing any of its magic.
02
The Moment of Truth
The next evening, after hours of staring at the same screens, Danny came in with hot chocolate for everyone.
“No problem,” she said. “A Christmas drink, just try it and drink it.”
We sat together in silence for a moment—no screens, no deadlines, thinking how magical Christmas really is.
Outside, the Xmas city lights were twinkling. Someone was playing Christmas music in the hallway. For the first time as a team, we weren’t just designers—we were just people sharing a warm moment.
Angela whispered,
“Maybe this… this feeling is what we need to design.”
03
Designing with Heart
We changed our process entirely.
Instead of asking, “What should this look like?”
We asked, “What should this feel like?”
We gathered some stories:
1. The smell of cinnamon from childhood
2.The Christmas winter mornings
3.That soft joy when someone surprises you.
4.The first snow that makes you stop for a second
5. Family Christmas night.
Now we didn’t design screens.We were designing moments.
Anthony added a tiny sparkle animation when users complete an action.
Angela changed the tone of the messages to sound and feel more like a friend, not just a brand.
Danny redesigned the palette to feel like warm light on a cold evening.
Piece by piece, the Christmas magic started to appear inside the product not because we forced it, but because we finally felt it.
04
The Christmas Presentation
By the final week, something had changed in our studio.
And for the first time in weeks, the design team wasn’t just working we were soaking in the season we were designing for.
We laughed more.We designed with our hearts.
By the time the final presentation day arrived, the design studio smelled like cinnamon and fresh pine.
We decorated the meeting table with Xmas LED stars, and someone put on a quiet instrumental Christmas playlist just enough to feel festive, but not distracting.
The clients walked in smiling and surprised.
“Wow… it feels like Christmas in here,” one of them said, loosening their scarf and sat comfortable.
We showed them the flow the warm onboarding screens,
the gentle animations inspired by warmth of Christmas magic and the confirmation message that read like a soft holiday note instead of a generic system prompt.
And when we handed them branded mugs of gingerbread latte we made earlier that morning, their faces softened the same way ours had.
In that moment, I realized something simple and beautiful:
We weren’t just designing a Christmas experience.
We were living it.
And maybe that’s the real magic of this season the way it reminds designers that feeling comes before function, and that joy, when shared, becomes a design system of its own.
Christmas taught us that design isn’t just a craft—it’s an emotion.
It reminded us that people not always remember shapes.
They remember how something made them feel. This project wasn’t just a holiday campaign. It was a gentle reminder that:
To design magic, you have to slow down and notice it and start to feel it.
To design warmth, you have to feel warm yourself.
To design Christmas… you have to allow yourself to believe in it again.
And this year, we did just that.
“Behind every Christmas design is a simple intention, to give someone a tiny pixel of joy, even if they never know who designed it.”
