helping build amazon's culture
Phone Tool awards
What are Phone Tool awards?
Phone Tool icons are digital icons or badges that Amazonians (Amazon employees) can earn and display on their internal employee profile pages, called Phone Tool pages. These icons represent various achievements, participation in events or activities, or membership in communities within Amazon's culture.
From my understanding, there was an intense and distinct culture around Phone Tool awards prior to the pandemic as people would rush to collect limited special or edition ones. While I joined Amazon after the pandemic, it is fun to hear the stories of Phone Tool icons in their glory days.
While they are allegedly less popular now, people still collect them and have them with pride on their internal pages and I have spent extra bandwidth I have designing them for different orgs for various reasons including product launches, milestone acheivements, and participation in impactful events.
What goes into it?
While I have no formal intake process for Phonetool Awards, I consistently expressed my interest in visual design projects across teams and took up opportunities I could to have a little more light-hearted fun. A nice change of pace then constantly creating enterprise tools for AWS.
Phonetool awards have some specific criteria to quality:
They must uphold the criteria of the the desginition of an award through the description and reason for creation
Be exactly 120x30px in side (I know, tiny)
With these two constraints, you have the creative liberty to do whatever you want! I have created over 18, check out some of my favorites!
**I do apologize for the quality of some of them, I had a corrupt illustrator file so some of them are just the original 120x30px files.
Get in touch! aarushg@gmail.com