Illustration > American Greetings
I got to illustrate this my own concept for a big department of American Greetings. A department full of artists way way way more talented than me. No pressure, right? OMG. It was so stressful and so fun. I had a lot of branding concepts we’d presented them, and this one was the most illustration heavy. I’d started with marker sketches, and once we got approval, I had to do it for reals. I did it all in Illustrator and layered the HELL out of the thing so I could move everything around. And the reason I went vector at the beginning was because I was starting in the aspect ratio of the website we would redesign. I’d already figured out how the functionality of the site would work, but once that was in development, I knew i’d have to blow up the final illustration to dress a giant trade show booth wall, as well as shrink it tiny for PowerPoint templates. The hardest part of the whole thing was getting the characters right. We had to change them without really changing them. Get it? They had to be different and modern, but recognizable. Oh man, we burned so much time on those before we got to the stylized silhouettes in the final. Oh hey, did you notice that the island is in the shape of American Greetings’ rose logo? Corny? Sure, maybe – but I still love that.
FINAL: Woof. I was happy with where we ended up together, but man, what a ton of work! Hahaha. All of it fun, tho.
WORK IN PROGRESS: I presented a whole bunch of ideas and the winner was the loosest sketch in that presentation. Clockwise from the upper left: 1. That’s that doodle that helped sell the approved idea. 2. This is my rough of how the island would work when shaped like the American Greetings rose (and how everyone might fit on it). 3. You can see how we refined the thing a little tighter so we could eventually get to tighter still 4. Even tighter still, this file was labeled home_07 and the last one I’d do before fine tuning would be labeled home_14. Yeah. 14 full island revisions.
OPTIONS: Like the logo part of this project, I had to modernize all the characters (I KNOW, I GOT TO DO MY OWN INTERPRETATION OF CARE BEARS!), without actually changing them. On the left is some early work I presented, taking the characters from original, to slightly modified, to really modified. I drew and built the whole thing in Adobe Illustrator, so everything was it’s own vector piece of something. I even gave lots of options to AGP for the banner styling that would identify the characters on the island. Fussy much?
OTHER IDEAS AND FINAL CHARACTERS: So aside from the final product (the map website) there were all kinds of incidental elements leading up to the final. There were a ton of webpage designs that were presented as fully illustrated. Because once we sort of nailed the map look and feel, you could apply it to anything. Up top is an unused bit of title work for the website. Below that, and this is so me, a topographical side view of the AGP island and where all the characters are located on it. It was another way to handle website navigation in a visual way (yeah, the icons were links). Lastly, you can see where we ended up with the characters and see how they compared to the originals.
There were so many layers to this, as I mentioned before. I spent forever meticulously labeling each element so that when it came time to readjust the map to fit different aspect ratios, it was super easy and fast to make adjustments, big or small (like moving the boats and sea elements in, or pulling them out further from the island). Even each of the waves was labeled. It sucks to do it, but ALWAYS take the time to label your layers right. You’ll never be sorry you did.
DAVE SOPP – Creative
Yep, that’s me. I’ve got over 20 years of marketing strategy, graphic design, advertising art direction, and illustration experience. Want to use some of it? Email me at dave@davesopp.com
