verizon

For Hispanic Heritage Month, Verizon set out to document something that did not have a home yet: the fast growing, region and generation specific slang Latinos use to text each other. The result was Textspañol, a crowdsourced site built around illustrator Humberto Cruz's vibrant artwork, where fans could submit their own Spanish textspeak by texting a short code, browse entries other people had already sent in, and test their knowledge with a quiz. We designed and built the site in full, from the UI and UX to the underlying build, in both English and Spanish.

The tricky part was connecting two very different worlds cleanly: a plain text message sent to a short code, and a rich, bilingual site meant to showcase it beautifully seconds later. Every submission had to move from SMS into the site's phrase collection without breaking stride, in whichever language it arrived in, while the whole experience still felt like one cohesive, vibrant brand world rather than two systems stitched together.

What shipped was a site that felt as playful and vibrant as the phrases themselves, fully bilingual, fast, and built so the illustration and the interface never felt like two separate things. Texts came in, phrases appeared on the site in real time, and the quiz and sticker pack downloads carried the campaign through end to end.