AmericanMuscle Holiday Gift Garage

It's been a while, to say the least. Most of the summer was consumed of designing for the AmericanMuscle Mustang Show, traveling here and there and moving to a new spot. I'd like to pick back up where I am currently, and then hopefully backtrack to share some of the show graphics.

Every year the holiday promotions seem to get bigger and more involved. This year, the company has introduced zmags, an outlet for the graphic designers to create custom landing pages without having to utilize our busy e-commerce developers. I worked on the AmericanMuscle Holiday Gift Garage campaign that included a zmags landing page, on-site graphics, email graphics, display adwords, social graphics and catalog covers and inserts.

I started with a really awesome in-house photo of our 2015 Mustang in the snow. I made a few adjustments in Camera Raw to boost the image quickly.

I wanted the overall campaign to have an icy winter feel to it, so I began by color changing the car to Grabber Blue and building out the background for the catalog cover. The build out is a bit rough, but worked with the layout I had.

I also needed to cut out the car for the web graphics I intended to use. Additionally, I wanted to render out the other car generations from Keyshot, so I removed the car from the scene in Photoshop so the other cars would lay over top. I kept the original wheels and shadow to get the placement of the new cars in their accurately. Below is the back plate I used for the renders.

I added cars into Keyshot and added additional aftermarket parts to them that were built in-house. Below is the 2014 Mustang with added mods that was placed in the scene, color changed and with an HDRI map applied and edited to look closely to the original 2015. 

I repeated this process for the other four Mustang generation cars. While those were rendering, I focused on the layout of the custom zmags landing page. 

I started off with a rough concept for both desktop and mobile. I wanted to combine lifestyle imagery and product imagery throughout the layout while working with the categories selected by the Marketing Department. Without having all of the finalized product sku's and images, I came up with the below version for desktop.

Through a few rounds of revisions, it landed closely to the above design and was then made generationally. I used the rendered cars at the top of this and then a mix of in-house lifestyle photography and product photography. I incorporated sliders into a few categories as well as off-car product photography to give the layout dimension and variety. Throughout the entire layout, I placed a vector geometric pattern that symbolized wrapping paper. Overall the goal was to have a winter feel with holiday hints carried throughout. Below is a closeup of a section with the "wrapping paper" pattern darkened to more easily see the design.

Note: the above image was pulled from Fox Racing and was the design inspiration and direction for the Holiday Gift Certificate Promotion I'll show later. I also incorporated these vector elements in the campaigns logo I was working on simultaneously.

"Holiday Gift Garage - The Perfect Presents" was the marketing copy for this entire package. Similarly to last year, I designed a logo to be used throughout the campaign to be included in web graphics and on the catalog covers. I used the above vector pattern within the logo I designed and created a version to be used on white and on black.

I also needed a version with slightly different copy to be used in display ads and Facebook social graphics.

Before sending all of the above into the proofing system, I did a quick mock of the AmericanMuscle catalog cover for the 2015-2017 generation. The layout of the copy was later revised, but the overall imagery and concept was approved.

Once the above was approved, I made some tweaks per request and began making the additional site, email, display and social graphics while building out the zmags landing page. I did the full package for the '15-'17 generation first before duplicating and creating the others. Below is the final 2010-2014 generation homepage hero.

When the customer clicks on Shop Gifts, they are taken to the zmags landing page. Below is the 2015-2017 landing page I had designed and built via the Creator.

While the campaign is still live on AmericanMuscle.com, you can view and interact with the landing page here. The final catalog cover design for that same generation is below. As you can see I incorporated the vector elements on the front and back cover as I had throughout the landing page.

The catalogs arrived in customers' mailboxes this month and also featured an insert that included products within the Holiday Gift Garage. Below is the 4-page insert design. 

Many other graphics were built to promote this campaign on the various channels. Below includes email graphics and display ads.

Holiday Gift Garage

I have been abnormally quiet on my blog posts as of late again, and I'll assure you once more that it is not due to a lack of work being made. Outside of work there have been lots of progress on my CB that I will have to share, however at work it has been booming with holiday graphics. 

The conception of this years Holiday Gift Garage began already in the beginning of August. In previous years we have used templates that focused on the grid, but overall became simple and standard. This year we wanted to design something more exciting, with a bit more of an editorial approach that played with hierarchy more than the previous design. 

I went to the drawing board, conscious of potential limitations with development and pulled inspiration from a variety of sites. Particularly I was intrigued by Burton and Swell and how they arranged their lifestyle imagery while still abiding to the grid. Below are the rough mocks I began with.

I worked back and forth with our Art Director and compared mocks. We tossed ideas around and essentially scrapped most of our initial ideas to really break away from the generic grid and what we have done in the past. We began looking at a variety of other retailers and the way they represent collections of products and I believe we landed somewhere very exciting. Of course all the while, we were very conscious of how our new layout would be translated from desktop to mobile versions. 

There was a lot of sketching and designing done before we had a finalized list of categories and products. While this was at times was a complicated guessing game, it did allow for pure creativity and innovation. Eventually we got all of the pieces we needed from our Merchandise team and the copy and ticket requests rolled in from the Marketing team. Once we had our approved ideas sketched out in Photoshop, we grouped up with the web development team to make sure our designs would be possible. With a few tweaks needed, we were set. 

Because this Holiday Gift Garage would span across our two stores: ExtremeTerrain.com and AmericanMuscle.com, we needed more hands to get it all completed. I essentially worked through ExtremeTerrain's layout from conception to completion. AmericanMuscle mirrored the layout and I managed to create the finalized template we would need for slicing and passed it on to another designer to crank out the generational imagery. Other aspects included hero banner composites which were primarily handled by the other designer and became our future catalog covers. Logos for each Holiday Gift Garage were tweaked and geared towards their respective brands. All in all this beast of a project required a ton of hands and elbow grease to get it to where it is now. Below are what the two garages look like that went live today.

A lot of work went into the conception part of this process, and I believe it really shows in the final product. At times designers get into a production mode and focus on efficiency rather than expanding upon creativity, so looking back, this was a refreshing method of design.

View the Gift Garages here: ExtremeTerrain.com & AmericanMuscle.com 

The Wrangler Off-Road Shop

The Wrangler Off-Road Shop is the ExtremeTerrain version of what I previously showed for the Mustang Off-Road Shop. This large project also involved a full logo design, website graphics, email graphics, display banners, social banners and will be featured on the next ExtremeTerrain catalog cover. Below is the logo design:

This project included an in-house photo shoot with the direction being a shot of a Jeep on the dyno within a workshop setting. Below are the retouched photos for a JK Wrangler and TJ Wrangler (retouched by myself and another designer).

This imagery was then transformed into a wide array of applications with a variety of dimensions. Below is a desktop landing page for the Wrangler Off-Road shop along with the unique category icons that were made for each Jeep Wrangler generation that ExtremeTerrain offers. 

I will share the catalog cover that my teammate finalized with this creative once it hits the shelves.

The Gift Garage on ExtremeTerrain.com was another project I had this holiday season. I selected the variety of lifestyle images from our in-house photography collection to represent each category of products that Merchandising provided. The main graphic was also used as a catalog cover for our 2015 Holiday drop. The site "holidization" in the header and footer (tire tracks in snow and snowflakes) was also designed by me the prior year.