Archive

An additional group of campaigns I've art directed and have always been happy to share. Much of this work was made at smaller agencies and I consider the limited budgets and resources a point of pride. I fought back at limitations with multiple fonts (Avia/ESPN) and custom illustration styles (Brooks/Woodland Park Zoo) of my own creation. Also, I drew a pterodactyl fighting an orca for a commercial and no one stopped me. Who wouldn't be chuffed with that?

BROOKS RUNNING

Brooks running shoes were often perceived as exclusive to hardcore runners. This was partly due to their limited availability through specialty retailers. In an attempt to draw in casual fitness runners, Brooks began to widen its distribution to mass-market sporting goods stores. The 'Run Happy' campaign was created to push the pure joy of running to a wider audience.

SAUZA 901

In my time at La Comunidad, I was the senior art director on a marathon creative effort to introduce the world to a partnership in the spirits category between Sauza and Justin Timberlake’s 901.

Our creative challenge was to combine the history of Casa Sauza, a storied tequila brand, with the personality of arguably the world's most iconic pop star. So, we had JT himself introduce a new player on tequila’s top shelf with a series of videos and social media posts telling the Sauza 901 story.

Below is a sampling of the initial creative work, including the visual style that I developed over months of social posting.

ESPN UNITE

With UNITE, ESPN was looking to find a late-night college-aged audience. We did this by billing the show as the place "Where Sports and Stuff Unite." What kind of stuff? Stupid stuff, weird stuff, cats riding turtles stuff. You know the guys who switch over to Adult Swim after the late Sportscenter is over? The kind of stuff those guys care about. Then we branded the show with a hand-drawn campaign that posed absurd hypotheticals to get the conversation started.

AVIA

Our mission was to take AVIA away from being a family shoe brand and give it the teeth to speak to the mindset of the crossfit audience. They needed something uniquely ownable that distanced them from the high-polished, generic athletic shoe market, where NB, Saucony, K-Swiss and others all look the same. The work needed to feel raw, stark and brutally honest. 

The illustration solution was both conceptual and practical. Conceptual in its distinction from the glossy running shots that everyone else in the category were using, and practical in that we could do it in-house on the cheap. 

The athletes we were talking to take a masochistic approach to their training. They give everything they have, every workout. We wanted to champion that idea, and let them know that AVIA understands how they think, and how they train. That’s why we embraced black-and-white, both as a color palette and a philosophy. Either you’re training or you’re not. There’s no gray area. The imagery we chose were hyperbolized metaphors for all the challenges athletes face, external as well as internal. Paid off with a simple, honest truth. Push on.

The result was AVIA signing contracts with over 500 crossfit gyms across the country, and striking a chord with crossfit athletes everywhere.