AmericanMuscle Presidents' Day Sale

When there is an American-related holiday, AmericanMuscle likes to make sure the creative reflects strong American imagery that includes the flag and red, white and blue. For this year's Presidents' Day Sale imagery I began with a photo taken by our in-house photo department a few years ago.

By using the bracketed images, I made some quick retouches to the photo, as shown below.

To make it more festive, I retouched the front car a bit more, added red white and blue accents to the plane on the right, and popped a flag into the background.

As all campaigns go here at AM, this image would serve as the concept and need to be made generationally. The plan was to keep the car in the back as is, and swap out the car in the foreground. Therefore, renders had to be made, so I jumped into Keyshot to make the other five Mustang generations. I used an under passage environmental map within Keyshot to get the reflections as close to the original as possible. I also added additional light pins to add and subtract light accordingly. I made all of the other cars silver and got the front wheels turned as well. Below are the five additional render composites.

The composites went fairly smoothly since the renders turned out so well. The floor in the original is so reflective I had to make sure I revised those reflections, particularly the wheels. The cars all being the same silver coloring made it overall easy to match, and the cropping of the graphics showed less of the reflection on the floor. In fact, for some graphics the crop was tight and only revealed the main car. Below is an example of a display banner with the tighter crop.

For some display banners and email graphics I got a bit more creative with the typography. Below are two examples of some additional design elements I added to the copy.

An additional piece to this campaign was to A/B test the Presidents' Day Sale emails. I have previously been working with another designer and the Email Marketing team to come up with new ideas and designs for promotional emails. We looked at a bunch of examples from other retail brands. Below are the A/B a-spot email graphics, but there are additional design elements being tested within the full emails as well.

The main difference is the location of the CTA in relation to the image and the incorporation of white space around the text. I'm looking forward to seeing how the new layout performs in comparison to the one we've been using. These graphics are currently on site at AmericanMuscle.com as the hero banners. Feel free to check them out!