For Christmas this year, Sky bought back the incredibly popular advent calendar for the UI, showcasing exclusive content each day in the build up to Christmas. As this was the second year the calendar would be returning, the brief was to design a fresh look and feel to the advent calendar whilst keeping the core elements like the open windows and rail elements as the main focal points.

For the initial stages, I looked at a few different layouts for the main key art, incorporating a more random feel to the calendar window order similar to a traditional advent calendar, as well as working in a few more festive patterns and elements. See a few starting points below:

Initial Calendar Concepts

Following this stage, the team decided moving towards a green colour for the calendar as it was a step away from the previous design whilst keeping the within the festive colour palette. After this stage, I explored a few combinations of single line and stacked titles with a variety of window sizes to see what would best showcase the content:

Exploration of window sizes and title art placement

With the structure and title artwork decided, the rest of the project was spent populating and reworking artwork for each of the 25 days as well as creating a destination page where users could see closed doors for the upcoming days.

Additional typography work was need for several creatives including Games, Music and Festive Movie collections, which were fun additions to the the collection, examples of typography can be seen here:

Typography exploration for various collections featured within the collection

In total the campaign required upwards of 30 different variations of content to accommodate different viewing schedules for the U.K and Ireland and drove a total of 2.9m clicks and 2m actions, meaning it drove a 142% increase in engagement YoY and making it the most successful campaign of 2025. 

A few highlights from the campaign can be seen below: