It's that time already-where the graphics department actively works on creative for the upcoming Mustang Show. A lot of the creative I am working on including the program and apparel items that I am unable to share until the show, however, there are a few web items I've worked on that are currently live.
One of the new additions for this year is an #AM2017 Mustang Show landing page. This page is a hub of all things show-related including a teaser video, how to register for the show, special events info, all about the show, FAQs and sponsors. The marketing efforts have greatly increased this year, and it has been proving to be quite effective in that registration sign-ups are skyrocketing!
This landing page design is based off the original Gift Garage/Seasonal Collection landing page I had worked with the Art Director on the end of last year. The web team was able to develop a template that was flexible and could be used for this page. After a couple planning meetings, we got all of the design, image assets and copy in place. Below is a screenshot of this page.
At the bottom of the landing page, underneath the sponsors list is another new graphic for this year. This Save Your Spot graphic that pushes to the Registration page is at this location on all pages of the AmericanMuscle.com site. I am curious to hear how the data rolls in, to see which efforts are performing the best, but overall it's becoming a success already. Stay tuned for more graphics to come over the next three months.
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.
I worked on the AmericanMuscle April Sale graphics that are currently online. The copy "unleash your Mustang" was my inspiration in choosing photos of cars on the track from our previous car shows. Several onsite, email and social graphics were created for this sale.
Below are the various photos I used to cover all of the AmericanMuscle Mustang generations.
ExtremeTerrain.com is having a $6,000 Custom Wrangler Build Giveaway and I designed the creative. The initial design direction was a Wrangler off-roading in the mud. I sifted through our in-house lifestyle photography and found some more recent photos of a Jeep we have not used much yet in our XT graphics. There were various shots of this Wrangler in the mud, however it didn't include very much greenery in the images. Since this sweeps is running March through April, I decided to retouch the photos and composite in some leaves.
The initial photo had some foreground elements, mostly sticks, but this inspired me to add a brand with leaves. I used a Gaussian blur filter on a stock branch photo to make it look like it's in the foreground and out of focus.
I also added some subtle green grass and leaves to the background. From there I placed this main image in various email and on-site templates and added copy. Below is an email a-spot and on-site banner showing the slightly different copy elements and design.
The social team requested several alt images, and I took the same approach as I did with the original image. I found two other angles of the same Wrangler and added touches of green throughout the scene. Below is one of the alts.
Check out ExtremeTerrain.com for the latest sweepstakes and aftermarket Jeep Wrangler products.
I created a few graphics for a Rugged Ridge rebate for the AmericanMuscle F-150 site. The rebates and details can be found here at AmericanMuscle.com. Below is the on-site banner featuring the Rugged Ridge rebate. The following image is another on-site banner that viewers are directed to from the rebates page. An email graphic was also designed based off of this creative.
Overall this was a quicker project and all imagery used is in-house product photography.
AmericanMuscle ran another free gift campaign this month where the customer could choose one of eight apparel items if they spent over the set threshold ($150). The graphic designers meet up to discuss the monthly campaigns and bring inspiration to the table. I look at a lot of different sites for inspiration including Rip Curl, Backcountry, The Fasthouse, Fox Racing, Burton, Under Armour, Icon, FMF Exhaust and Roxy to name a few. Pretty much any sort of variety of motorsports, action sports or outdoors-related business are fair game to pull inspiration. With this being an apparel project, I no doubt focused a lot of Fox Racing's web banners and email graphics. I was really drawn to the image below that Fox used as a homepage banner on their site:
I really liked the split imagery, The Fasthouse uses this method a lot as well with their web banners throughout their site. With this project I was finally able to execute this look.
One of our challenges that the designers face is showing giveaway items creatively while also showing the vehicle. For example, this apparel promo would perform best, based on previous testing, with a Mustang also in the creative. With that said, in the past we've incorporated models and Mustangs in shots, and they just haven't performed as great as one would predict. I believed this Fox example would prove to be the most successful blend of showing the apparel and also showing a lifestyle of a mustang. My team agreed, as did the Marketing department, and soon enough the concept was approved.
The next step was to submit a photography request so they could order the eight apparel items for a custom shoot. I provided this example and some additional apparel examples of things I was looking for. Below are the examples I included for the shoot:
The top image is what I envisioned for the on-site graphics. The second image was what another designer brought to our monthly inspirational meeting. I planned to use an image similar to this with tools for the email creative. The goal with the email was to be more mysterious and have the customer guessing what the "free gift" could possibly be. The in-house photographer took a variety of shots based on these examples. The lifestyle portion of the web banner concept would just be pulling from our current in-house photography library on our server.
Throughout the process there were some copy adjustments, but overall the concept was really well received. Below is one of the on-site desktop graphics featuring imagery very similar to the initial concept proposed:
For email, we also ended up going with the split design and ran a copy A/B test. I used a more vague photo of the apparel including the tools. Below are the A/B versions of an email a-spot:
I was really happy with the end result of this project. It's interesting to see how similar the initial concept is with the final creative, yet has its own feel. Below are the rest of the generational lifestyles. This project included desktop and mobile site graphics as well as email a-spot and b-spots.
Part of my on-going duties is to maintain and update house brand websites. The Raxiom brand continues to expand as more products are created for various vehicles including Mustang, F-150 and Wrangler. As new products are added, I like to continue to add them to the Featured Products section of Raxiom.com. This month I added ten new products to the top of the featured section and worked with the web development team to execute the additions.
Updates for this section are pretty simple, as I pull the assets, arrange them in the grid and slice them up. I also provide the sort category (vehicle type), product name and the type of Raxiom product (ie: Performance Lighting) that appears on hover. The sort function is what I think is the highlight of this grid of products, as you can see different parts for different vehicles and the boxes rearrange accordingly. This site is responsive and so is that functionality. Check it out here: Raxiom.com/featured.
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!
A few months ago I had posted about some updates on the brand website Raxiom.com when F-150 imagery was added throughout the site. At that time there was talk about revising the warranty page to make it the same throughout all of the Raxiom products, regardless of what vehicle the products would fit. While the internal teams worked out the specifics, I put in a photo request to have three different vehicles photographed together for an image at the top of the warranty page. As of now Raxiom products fit Mustangs, F-150's and Wranglers. Our in-house photographer shot all three vehicles in the studio while bracketing and then shooting each vehicle individually. I selected the base shot that worked the best, clipped out the vehicles and did some retouch work. While the lights were on in the photographs, I added some flare to balance out each vehicle and took lighting pieces from other bracketed shots. I added Raxiom windshield banners to each of the vehicles and popped in a lighting effect behind the three so they would pop on the dark background of the Raxiom site. Another designer redesigned the "2 Year Full Warranty" logo and it fit quite nicely with the new page design. Below is the new page that the ecommerce developer coded based on my Photoshop file and slices. Feel free to check it out here: raxiom.com/warranty
It's really special to be apart of a company that doesn't forget about the bigger picture, the bigger world out there. ExtremeTerrain did a complete Jeep overhaul for a wounded police officer, Officer Dorman, who is a local hero in Delaware County, Pennsylvania. Officer Dorman was injured on the job not very long ago, taking several bullets and is currently healing towards a full recovery. The Southern Delaware Jeep Club contacted ExtremeTerrain to do a few mods and it turned into a large project within a quick turnaround.
While most of this project was handled by our XT installation specialists, video and marketing departments, of course the creative team had their share in helping this project see the light. Various departments came together quickly to work with the e-commerce team to get a landing page together. I was fortunate enough to complete the design of the landing page pulling design and UI elements from various places for it all to come together in an efficient matter. Once all of the photos, videos, copy blocks and events were completed it turned into something like this: ExtremeTerrain.com/police-officer-chris-dorman-jeep-reveal.html (also shown below). Be sure to watch the video on there, huge props to our video team as well.
Overall my task with this landing page were minimal and I more so managed how to get all of the pieces together. The sketches were previously drawn by in-house designer, Peter Owen. He took on the work to composite the Jeep images in the background for the slider at the top. The various photos I selected required minimum retouching that I took on, and the reveal photo took some retouching and compositing to get what we were looking for with that final image. With the copy and content being provided it was my responsibility to make visual changes as revisions came in and get those mock ups out quickly so everyone involved in the project could see the changes and approve and/or provide feedback. My part seems small in the spectrum of all that went into making this build possible, however, I am quite grateful to have been a part of this very positive and inspiring story.
ExtremeTerrain is currently running a monthly sale for July, and I was responsible for the creative. I initially found this JK Wrangler image from our in house photographs and did a little retouching. I added some elements to make it look like the jeep was kicking up dirt and really wheeling. This shot has a lot of background included and was cropped in closer in various ways for a variety of graphics.
I found and retouched similar images for the TJ and YJ gens, shown below, while adding some extra elements such as dirt, a lens flare and XT branding:
These images were used for homepage graphics, email a-spots and b-spots, as well as various other site and social applications. Where live text was used I livened up the copy by mixing typefaces as shown below in a forum banner:
Visit ExtremeTerrain.com during the month of July to see this creative live on their site.
