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.

XT April Sale

This month I also did the creative for ExtremeTerrain.com's monthly sale. I began with a base shot of a rolling JK and composited a more interesting background. Below is the original and the retouched composite.

I needed a TJ version as well so I used the same base shot and rendered a TJ using KeyShot to get the exact angle. 

I then took the render into Photoshop, removed the JK in the background but kept the JK wheels instead of having to recreate the blur. The original JK was a 4-door, so I moved the wheels closer together to work with the TJ body. Along with that came adjusting the shadow on the road.

These final composites were then used in various email, site and social graphics to promote the XT April Sale. I treated the typography in email similarly to how it is on site.

The creative is currently running as a homepage banner at ExtremeTerrain.com. Check it out while you can.

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!

AM January Sale

Every now and then a designer will do a project that they're happy with, but for various reasons it may be replaced with something else. That's the case with this AmericanMuscle January Sale creative I made last month. I went in with a concept of a rolling car in an cold winter scene. Below is the inspirational image I found in a Google search.

With the concept approved, I searched through various stock backgrounds to get a similar feel. When I found the image below I flipped the orientation, removed some distracting elements, adjusted the color and warmth of the photo and then added motion blur.

The above wasn't the final back plate I used, but it was enough to get started on the renders. I first rendered the 2015 Mustang and made it a dark gray to keep the overall icy feel that was in the inspirational image. I did some compositing with the render to get everything to fit in the scene. From there I added the 2015 image into the various on site and email templates. What I found was most of the winter background ended up getting cropped out due to the orientation of the templates. Below is an on site web banner.

I do feel the image is more impactful with more mountains and sky showing, however, the wintry feel was still very much there in the crop. I proceeded with the other car generations and composites to complete the full package. For graphics that needed copy, I kept it simple. Below are some generational web banners with the simplistic copy.

I was happy with the final graphics for this project. Unfortunately it needed to be replaced with alternative creative, but sometimes that's how it goes in the design world. On to the next!

AmericanMuscle Top Fall Mods

AM Top Fall Mods is not an overly large campaign to design for, but I spent a solid amount of time on the creative. We recently got a really awesome shot from our in-house photography and I wanted to use it for its seasonality. Below is the original shot.

I did some minor retouching by cleaning up the background and wanted to enhance the fog to make it seem like the temperature is beginning to cool off with the change in season. I retouched the car slightly and added some AmericanMuscle branding.

With this being the concept image, I sent it off to the various channels to get everyone on board with the imagery. It was a success and I proceeded to make the other generations. Since only one vehicle was shot in this scene, I resorted to using Keyshot to render out the other cars to place in this scene. In order to do that, I made a back plate image that would serve as the background image for each render I would make. My teammate composed an HDRI map from the location and matched the coloring to make the renders feel as real as possible. Below is the back plate image I created in Photoshop by removing the car from the scene.

I began with the 2015 model we have and worked on perfecting the orientation. I also made a paint color in Keyshot to be the Guard Green stock color which looks quite similar to the Bullitt Green of older Mustang generations. I did some work in post as well to get the black values to match the scene and created lighting in Photoshop as well. Through a few rounds of proofs and revisions, below are the final renders.

All are a similar green with the exception of the 10-14 which is a silver to go with the traditional stock paint colors. Overall I am very happy with how well these render/composites turned out. Once I got them all together I was able to make the various on-site, email and social graphics that were requested for this campaign. On-site we use live text which are restricted to web fonts, however with email and social I was able to be more creative with the typography and stylize the "Fall" messaging. Below is an email a-spot and b-spot with the stylized type in different arrangements.

Today the promotion has gone live on AmericanMuscle.com.