Case study · Unity Technologies, Shanghai · Where it started

Digital marketing for Unity’s China market

Sixteen months with Unity's Shanghai team: 20+ localized campaigns for one of Unity's largest markets, and my first lesson in how design craft and growth data belong together.

RoleDigital Marketing UX Design & Digital Marketing Internamp; UX Design Intern

Company

Unity Technologies, Shanghai

TimelineApr 2021 – Aug 2022

CraftLocalization · SEO & SEM · Social · Community

A set of Asset Store promotion banners localized for China: spring sale, 11.11, Procedural Worlds, Unity Mars, and new-year offers — A slice of the 20+ campaigns — spring sale, 11.11, Unity Mars — with hierarchy and type rebuilt around dense Chinese copy.

Unity’s localized Chinese-market website homepage with hero and industry solution cards — The localized Chinese-market web presence the campaigns fed into.

Context: a global brand, a local market

I joined Unity Technologies in Shanghai in April 2021 as a UX design and digital marketing intern on the Asset Store side of the business. China is one of Unity's largest markets, and the store is a direct line between Unity and the developers who build on it. My job sat in the gap between a global brand system and a local audience that reads, shops, and shares differently.

Localization design

I owned localization design for the Asset Store in China, adapting global campaign materials into more than 20 campaigns over the course of the internship. The discipline this built was constraint-handling.

Localization is not translation

Layouts composed around short English headlines collapse under Chinese copy, so hierarchy gets rebuilt while staying recognizably Unity
Guidelines are a grammar

Brand guidelines are a starting grammar, not law
Make the case upward

When a local adaptation genuinely needs to bend a rule

Growth channels

Alongside the design work, I drove growth across SEO, SEM, social media, and developer community channels. Traffic and engagement data decided what we made next: which campaign formats earned attention, and which content the developer community actually shared.

Bilibili video collections: live-stream replays, Made with Unity showcases, digital-twin explainers, and Unite 2022 talks — The Bilibili content mix — live-stream replays, Made with Unity showcases, Unite talks.

Grid of Unity bootcamp showcase games spanning ARPG, roguelike, simulation, and puzzle genres — The developer bootcamp showcase — community output the channels amplified.

That changed how I design. When you watch a campaign's numbers the morning after it ships, you stop arguing taste in the abstract and start forming hypotheses you can check. Pairing craft with measurement became a habit, and it has followed me into every product I've built since.

Collaboration & ChinaJoy

Campaigns rarely stayed inside one team. I partnered with recruiting, technical art, and brand teams on co-branded videos and tutorials, which meant negotiating tone and ownership across groups with different goals.

The virtual UNITE Shanghai expo world with developer community and partner zones — The virtual UNITE Shanghai expo space built for the event push.

Four photos of Unity's booth and stage at ChinaJoy 2021 — On the floor at ChinaJoy 2021 — Unity's booth, stage, and brand build-out.

I also supported Unity's presence at ChinaJoy, Asia's largest gaming expo. Watching developers react to the work in person, at a booth instead of through an analytics panel, was the most direct user research I had done up to that point.

The internship in numbers

20+ localized campaigns Shipped across the internship, from spring sale to 11.11.

4 growth channels owned SEO, SEM, social, and developer community, owned together.

This was my first industry role, and I won't dress it up as more than an internship. It was, however, a sixteen-month one with real ownership, and it shaped how I think about design as part of a distribution system rather than a deliverable.

What stayed with me

The internship ended in August 2022, and it remains the foundation of how I work. It taught me that design lives inside a business context: a beautiful asset that no one finds hasn't done its job.

It also set the pattern I've kept ever since, which is owning a problem end to end rather than a slice of it. The scope was small compared to what I build now, but the shape of the work was already there: design, data, and shipping in one pair of hands.