Art, brand, and merch requests

Contents

🎨 Need artwork or merch? Please request it using the request templates in the PostHog/marketing repo — this is the only place art and brand request issues should be opened. Do not open them in the posthog.com repo, and do not request art or merch over Slack or email.

All artwork and merch requests are handled by Lottie Coxon, Heidi Berton, and Daniel Hawkins on the Graphics team.

They can help you with things like:

  • Custom visuals for paid ad campaigns
  • Blog and social media artwork
  • New themed hedgehogs
  • Custom CTAs and banners
  • Branded merch
  • Animated UI elements

💡 You might not need a request at all. brand.posthog.com has ready-made brand assets — logos, colors, hedgehogs, and crests — that any team can use without filing an issue. The hedgehog library below covers approved hogs too.

They get a lot of work requests, so they use two separate project boards to organize work – one for merch and one for other art projects. This reflects that merch projects often have much longer timelines and need to be handled differently.

Whenever you want to request a new merch design or other artwork, you should use the relevant design request templates in the marketing repo – one template for merch, one for other art requests. The templates assign the right people and apply the right labels, but they do not add the issue to a project board – see below for how issues get onto the board.

Art board automations

The Art & Brand Planning board uses automations to keep work moving. Each behavior below names the thing that controls it, so you know where to look when something misbehaves. Everything except the first item is a GitHub Actions workflow living in the marketing repo; the board is org-level, so the workflows act on board issues wherever those issues live.

  • Getting on the board — controlled by the board itself, not by the Actions workflows or the issue templates. Items are added via the board's built-in auto-add workflow (board → ⋯ → Workflows → "Auto-add to project") or by hand, and land in the No Status column by default. Every automation below only applies to issues that are on the board – an issue that never gets added is invisible to all of them.
  • Done → closed — controlled by art-board-status-change.yml. It polls the board every 30 minutes and closes (as completed) any issue whose Status is Done, so expect up to ~30 minutes' delay after moving a card.
  • Assignee sync — also art-board-status-change.yml. When an issue is moved to "Assigned: Daniel", "Assigned: Lottie", or "Assigned: Heidi", the other default assignees are removed so only the owner remains. It only ever removes assignees, never adds them, and it is driven by the board column – not the labels. Requests filed by the Graphics team themselves keep all assignees, and other columns (like "Assigned: Cleo") are untouched, as Cleo has a different workload.
  • Artist labels — controlled by sync-artist-labels.yml. Every 30 minutes, open issues in an "Assigned: ..." column get the matching Lottie / Heidi / Daniel label (and lose it when moved elsewhere), so work can be filtered per person. The label mirrors the column, never the other way around.
  • Reminders — controlled by art-board-reminders.yml (via the reusable art-board-reminder.yml). Daily at 9 AM UTC it posts a comment on issues stuck in...
    • Feedback/Review for 10+ days: asks if any feedback is needed to move the task forward.
    • No Status for 7+ days: asks someone to pick it up or assign it to a column.
    • Each issue only ever gets one reminder of each type, and snoozed items are skipped.
  • Credentials — the workflows authenticate as the Art Board Bot GitHub App. Its credentials are org-level Actions secrets scoped to the marketing repo, and the app installation needs access to every repo that holds board issues. If all the workflows suddenly start failing at the "Get app token" step, one of those two things is the cause.

To establish a clear connection between the task and the working file, designers will create a frame containing a link to the task. They should then add a link to that frame within the task for easy reference.

Please give two weeks notice for new briefs — this is the preferred minimum, and more time is always better. For reference, the team receives roughly 25-30 new art requests a month, so new briefs are rarely picked up the day they land. A one-week turnaround is only possible for actual emergencies. If your request is a genuine emergency, please share your request issue in #team-graphics channel and mention Lottie, Daniel, and/or Cory.

If you need to chase for an update on a request, the best place to do it is a comment on the issue itself, not a Slack DM. Comments keep the context with the brief, notify the assigned artist, and the team triages from the project board.

Hedgehog library

For team members we keep all our currently approved hedgehogs in this Figma file. This enables us to look through the library of approved hogs, and to export them at required sizes without relying on the design team.

Here's how:

  1. Open the Figma file. You can manually browse, or use Cmd + F to search based on keywords such as 'happy', 'sad', or 'will smith'.
  2. Select the hog you want. If needed, adjust the size using the 'Frame' menu in the top of the right-hand sidebar.
  3. At the bottom of the right-hand sidebar, select the file type you need in the 'Export' menu, choose @2x, then select 'Export [filename]' to download the image.

If you can't find a suitable hog, you can request one from the design team.

Non-team members can find some of the most-used hogs to download on our press page.

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