Charlotte: Dynamic Ad Design

Bringing Dynamic Ad Design Into Charlotte’s Core Workflow
background
Charlotte is Epsilon’s proprietary ad design tool—a browser-based platform that lets creative teams build both static and personalized ads within the same environment. Unlike traditional design software, Charlotte connects directly to Epsilon’s dynamic ad system, enabling real-time personalization, targeting, and interactivity. As adoption grew, we focused on expanding its capabilities to meet the evolving demands of ad design and campaign performance.
What were solving for
Charlotte’s first release provided a solid foundation but left key gaps in the creative workflow. Project organization was cumbersome, and designers lacked built-in tools to design and preview interactive elements. As video ads became more important, the absence of native video support added further friction—forcing teams to rely on multiple tools and disrupting the continuity of their creative process.
Process
As a former art director myself, I approached this challenge knowing how easily new features can disrupt a designer’s flow. We began by meeting separately with Charlotte’s designers and the engineers building its backend—uncovering both creative expectations and technical constraints. Once key needs emerged, we brought both groups together to align on solutions that felt natural to designers while remaining scalable for engineering.
  • The legacy plug-ins were layered on top of design files and were cumbersome to use, and often became disorganized as projects grew in complexity.
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  • Interactive elements were represented by static placeholders, which often led to layout inconsistencies and extra design cleanup once the real functionality was added.
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  • Projects were difficult to track and organize, leaving designers to rely on naming conventions or external files to find the correct version.
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  • Video ad design wasn’t directly supported, so designer had to depend on external software for animation previews.

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solution
We introduced interactive components that link directly to elements on the artboard, allowing designers to define how each object behaves within the ad experience. This made it possible to design, preview, and adjust interactions—like carousels, ratings, or image rotators—directly within Charlotte without relying on external tools. We also redesigned the dashboard to help teams organize and access projects more efficiently, and expanded support toward video ad creation—continuing to evolve Charlotte around the real workflows of our designers.
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