Loved by Nordstrom
One icon borrowed from Instagram, twelve months of brand merchandising built on top of it.
Field Creative Direction Campaign Design Design Systems
Author Jeremy Prasatik Published: 2017 Status: Complete
Classification Creative Direction Campaign Design Design Systems
Abstract
The brief was emerging brand awareness - a Nordstrom mandate to lift smaller designer labels across the department store floor and the digital storefront at the same time. The solve was simpler than it sounds: borrow the heart icon from Instagram and let it carry the campaign signature.
One mark, two voices. "Liked by Nordstrom" sat on the smaller tiles for day-to-day merchandising, and "Loved by Nordstrom" carried the hero slots that earned the extra real estate. Same icon, same typography, different emotional weight - merchandising had a dial they could turn without touching the design.
Twelve months across social feeds, email sends, in-store signage, and web landing pages. The template absorbed whatever the brand had already licensed - Helmut Lang shot minimal and cold, The Great shot warm and narrative, See by Chloé led with product. The frame held all of them without flattening any of them, and the campaign ran long because there was nothing to get tired of.
The Heart Was Already a Verb.
People tapped it thousands of times a day without thinking. Stamping it on a retail campaign meant the mechanic came pre-installed. No one needed to learn what Liked By meant.
Two typographic levels did the work of a full brand hierarchy. "Liked" sat on the smaller tiles and "Loved" carried the hero slots - same icon, same typography, different emotional weight. Merchandising picked which tier a brand earned and the design held the frame.
A Tile That Worked As a Container.
Brand name on top, photography in the middle, heart and endorsement at the base. Anything could land in the middle slot - product shot, lifestyle frame, studio portrait, campaign still. The frame absorbed whatever the brand had already licensed.
The flexibility came from discipline at the structural level. Fixed grid, fixed type, fixed icon, everything else open. Merchandising got more freedom than the brands could have negotiated individually.
A heart does what a logo cannot
Two Tiers Giving Merchandising a Lever.
Loved By earned the bigger canvas - larger crops, tighter compositions, single-brand focus. When TIBI got the Loved treatment, the fur coat and the profile portrait ran at full-page scale, with the same type and heart but a different voltage.
Merchandising used the tier as a programming tool. Weekly pushes on Liked. Seasonal flagships on Loved. The design gave them a way to signal priority without writing a brief that said "make this one bigger." The tier showed up in the copy.
A Customer Saw It Twice in Two Days.
The tile rendered the same whether it showed up in a feed, an email hero, a window decal, or a landing page header. Scale changed, framing stayed, and recognition compounded across channels without anyone teaching the customer to look for it.
The landing page pulled the campaign into a navigation layer. Editorial stories organized by brand, the heart acting as a bookmark through the grid. The same photography that lived in a 1080-square social post scaled to a 1440-wide hero without new art direction. Crop spec, not redesign.
A Year on One Icon.
Campaigns usually start with a concept and dress it in a system. This one started with a system and let the concept stay small. Twelve months, dozens of brands, one heart.
Services
Creative Direction
Campaign Design
Design Systems
Stack
Art Direction
Photography Licensing
Editorial Systems
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The Instagram heart was the argument and the rest was restraint - keep the frame constant, keep the typography quiet, let the brand photography do the talking. The campaign ran long because there was nothing to get tired of, no slogans to swap, no treatment to reinvent for fall.
The tier between Liked and Loved gave merchandising a lever and gave designers a reason not to touch the layout every month. One icon, two levels, any asset, a year of output from a five-minute idea.
