I have a knack for making a complicated message, simple and understandable. When I was a freelance Art Director in San Francisco, way back at the dawn of the Internet, I was doing a permalance gig at J. Walter Thompson with my writer-partner and friend, Andrew Tonkin. We were there for months doing all kinds of interesting things that most creatives would stick their noses up at. It was some very technical tech work they were handling. But for us, it was just a bunch of hard problems to solve. For example, we were given the opportunity to show communications giant, Nortel, how to sell newly developed sophisticated switches to telecom providers so they could supply something new on the horizon that was way faster than dial-up Internet. I think it was called, oh, DSL or something. Yeah, I’ve been doing this for a long time.

Anyhoo, Andrew and I also got to try and convince engineers that coding with Java was easy. I didn’t know then if it actually was, and I don’t actually know now if it was back then. I may have been the only Art Director in SF to know how to make an animated gif banner ad (TRUE!), but it wasn’t like I was a super goober or something. Same with Andrew. All we knew was that if we could boil down what the nice account person took 45 minutes to tell us, we’d be golden.

And this little campaign was the end result and my favorite example of what I like to do. Take something hard and boring and turn it into something simple and kind of delightful. OMG, you wouldn’t believe how hard it was to find an illustrator who could ape the Dick and Jane children’s book style, though (Chuck Pyle)! We got Chuck to do the illustrations, got a photographer to shoot blank books on different elementary-school-type-desk surfaces, then married them all together. This is dumb, but I especially like how we handled the legal (running up the book shadow). It just disappears, making the ad look even more simple.