Black Friday ‘25
Role: Design Lead
Client: Shopify
Live, data-driven globe visualization for the Las Vegas Sphere
Each year during Black Friday, Shopify uses the Las Vegas Sphere as a public window into global commerce on the platform.
The takeover has centered on a single idea for several years: a globe with arcs representing sales happening around the world.
Rather than reinventing the concept annually, our challenge in 2025 was to meaningfully evolve it - visually, and technically - while preserving what had already resonated internally and externally.
Role
I led design for BFCM across concept, system definition, and execution, working closely with engineers, motion designers, and data scientists to shape how live commerce could be expressed at scale.
I was responsible for setting the creative framework - defining constraints, navigating tradeoffs between fidelity and performance, and executing key moments to ensure clarity and cohesion across the system.
System
A live system, not a pre-rendered animation.
Every element of the globe — arcs, metrics, UI, and atmospheric layers — was generated and rendered live. Orders, locations, and GMV updated in real time, turning the Sphere into a living visualization of commerce rather than a looping video.
The final system ran at 8K / 60fps in-browser, streamed through OBS to the Exosphere. Design decisions were inseparable from performance constraints, requiring close collaboration between design and engineering at every step.
Video Credit: Xor
Designing for a spherical surface introduces constraints that don’t exist on flat screens - legibility, distortion, and continuity all behave differently. Over three years of iteration, we refined a set of patterns that could hold up at scale.
A rotating UI belt carried live metrics and event branding around the circumference, while parallax and dynamic cloud shaders added depth without overwhelming the data. Typography and color cues were pulled from Shopify’s broader Black Friday system, allowing the Sphere to feel cohesive with the rest of the campaign while remaining purpose-built for its form.
Video Credit: Brian Oh
System to Story
Alongside the real-time system, our team created a social-first reveal film that traced individual purchases from personal devices, across city skylines, and finally to the Sphere as a visualization of commerce at global scale.
The primary audience for the work was online, and the creative was optimized for social sharing - using the Sphere as a narrative reveal rather than a standalone spectacle.