How to Make an Efficient, Effective First Impression.

Design > Website

Web design is a discipline that I can’t say is a focus of mine. BUT! And this is, as the kids say, a big but – I can do it, and do it pretty well. Case in point, the project I did to rebrand American Greeting Properties (AGP). They had confidence problems and we “re-skinned” them to fix it. The backbone of that effort was their website. Look, a website is all about organization and the hierarchy of information. For AGP they needed their homepage to be a gateway to a world of creativity. Their objective wasn’t to collect leads, sell product, or even a service. It just had to inform and make a desired impression. Not to downplay this, there was a LOT of impression to change, in the process. The website also had to tie together a lot of disparate assets and present them under a unified umbrella. So, not easy.

FINAL: The home page for American Greetings Properties.

FINAL: Clicking an area of the map (or in the legend) would bring a pop-up of everything you needed to know about each property.

FINAL: I’d designed and illustrated all the infographics for each properties detail page. This was a ton of work, but also a ton of fun.

FINAL: Here’s what clicking ABOUT US would bring you.

FINAL: How mobile would work along with a little secondary navigation idea that didn’t make it. Once the island drawing was finalized, I made a topographical rendering of it complete with a handy chart of who lived at what elevations. Hahaha.

I worked with an internal team who included a developer, so whatever I designed was sure to be actually possible to create. I’m a realist and won’t work under any other circumstances. Who wants to do a bunch of work and have it be impossible to implement? So we all decided on a simple structure. A home page base would present the entire site map (see what I did there?). Clicking a character would bring up a light box panel of information that would deliver everything (plus infographics) they needed to know. We created a format where a LOT of information could be conveyed in the most condensed form possible, without making anyone want to kill themselves. Easy.

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

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How to Illustrate for Illustrators.

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

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How to Redesign a Logo Without Redesigning a Logo.

Design > Logos

The objective was to “restage” a department of American Greetings (AG). American Greetings Properties wanted a new image, a new website, a fun tagline – the whole shebang. They also wanted a new logo, with one caveat: we couldn’t change the logo. The AG logo had to stay locked up, rose and all, with a very-light-if-not-white background. The good thing about the map/island concept they chose, is that it gave me a lot of visual cues to work with – the most important being the masthead for the maps legend. We’d already had a simple design for the legend bar that would be on the website, so I worked up a bunch of solutions to top it off properly. Locking it up in a structure let me off the hook for having to always keep the background white (or close to it). The logos had to be really simple to match the illustration style I used, so it was sort of painful going through old map books for inspiration and seeing how beautifully designed they could be. I did all of this in 2013, so if it looks a little hipster-familiar today, rest assured it didn’t in 2013. :-)

OPTIONS: So many options! I really rubbed my brain all over how to deal with getting the AGP logo to work as is in the map legend concept. These are just a small sample of what I tried (the row along the bottom) along with what they approved in the end (up top in the final image). I’m pretty happy with the final I think. Less all about being piratey. and a more restrained.

INCIDENTALS: I’m known to proclaim that “extra credit is for chumps”. Because even adding the slightest bit of delight will likely go unnoticed by all. The tiniest bit of extra work will go unrewarded. And no matter how passionately I believe this to be (sadly) the truth today, I can never stop doing extra credit. I guess it’s the Walt Disney fan in me. Here are some bonus lockups I did for AGP, so that when I was off the biz their designers would have some goodies to work with. I also left a bunch of illustration extra credit and you can see all that stuff here.

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

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How to Be Creative for Creatives.

Strategy > Branding

It all started at the big annual toy show in NY, the International Toy Fair. I was there representing Wrybaby and started up a convo in the Wrybaby booth with a nice guy who turned out to be from American Greetings. I don’t even know how we got to it, but he mentioned that they were looking for a way to do something that I can’t write about here (ask me in person and maybe I’ll tell you). I said I had an idea that would work perfectly for that. After the show, I pitched my idea to his boss over the phone. He was the head of American Greetings Properties (AGP). AGP managed licensing for all of American Greetings’ legacy properties like Hollie Hobbie, Care Bears, Madballs, Strawberry Shortcake etc. But they also thought up lots of new stuff, too. They were creating properties to develop themselves or to pitch to companies like Disney and Nickelodeon, and that’s why they took an interest in our idea. It was really out-of-the-box. So the head of AGP loved what we presented and said he wanted to make this idea happen with us. He flew down to visit our office in Mooresville, then he invited us for what would be a super weird visit to the AG mothership in Cleveland (ask me in person and I’ll tell you all about it). Then he dumped us into a really shitty negotiation process with AG’s entertainment lawyers in LA where they continuously threatened to steal our idea outright. Super hardball shitty. I told the lawyers that they and AGP could, literally, to go fuck themselves and hung up on them. And then the AGP boss asked us to rebrand them. Well, first he asked us to design a fun corporate team-building program for the department. And then he asked us to rebrand them. How freaking weird is that!?

FINAL: The whole idea was based on the home page. An island fantasy land of AGP properties where all the dispirit characters could live in harmony. You can check out the website design deets and see bigger pictures here.

BEFORE: This was AGP’s home page when I was brought on. You can see what they tried to do from the start – create a fun-but-not-too-fun envelope that can hold variously styled characters from the 70’s to today (the properties slugged along as a slide show). So, done, right? Sort of. The problem was that it didn’t set AGP up as the creative all-stars they were. It was just a generic box of characters you either knew or didn’t.

And we did it. Which was even weirder. But all of the (very real) unpleasantness aside, it was a cool project and they paid us what we were worth <shrug>. Chalk it up to me always rooting for the underdogs, I guess. Which, despite all the success and billions of dollars they generated, AGP and the team that supported it deserved more respect. We got to meet all the crazy-talented artists and writers on our visit and they seemed like normal, good people. Remember, AGP might be pushing a lot of old brands, but they were also in the business of thinking up of a lot of new, exciting characters and shows. The problem was, when the studios saw they were hearing a pitch from AGP, they thought a couple of corporate grandpas would be shuffling in to show them some old Holly Hobbie shit. The AGP boss wanted to change that perception.

COMPS: Some (not all) of the ideas we presented in the first round to AGP. Each idea included whatever it took to get the concept across. So some ideas came tight with taglines attached. Some were just rough sketches. Clockwise from top left: 1. Freshen up the old characters and spice up the new by presenting each character’s personality in a modern way. 2. Incorporate the characters into a graphic envelope (the safest idea, just in case they freak out over the others), 3. Explore exciting new worlds with AGP. Visit planets and discover unique characters. 4. The world of AGP as an island inhabited by strange, sweet, wonderful, and exotic characters.

American Greetings, duh, already has a brand. We were just giving the one department a new look. We started calling it a “restaging,” because we had to use the AG logo lockup unmolested in anything we did. So the first thing we did was present a whole mess of concepts (from tight to super sketchy) to hang their new skin on. These guys were all artists (and all WAY better than me), so we knew that they’d get what we meant if we showed them loose drawings. We showed them all kinds of directions they could go to solve their problem (as we do for every project). For example, there was one idea about how creative the team in the department was, and all the crazy things that happened in their building on the steady. We’d do a lot of videos, social media (with a focus on Linkdin), email newsletters to the industry, etc. The employees would get a chance to be stars and use their awesome talents to help promote their common cause. I only mention this so you can get an idea of how different each idea was. What they chose was way different. The idea was to refresh the old stuff, pull the new stuff into the spotlight, and bring all the properties together as one. Instead of being the keepers of the old that sometimes had new ideas, AGP would represent a big fun world of full of creative ideas. We’d just take “legacy” out of the conversation altogether.

FINAL: Every pop-up on the AGP website, in every category, would include a strip of bright, clever, modern infographics. One trivia block in each strip would be animated, too, leaving the visitor with a ton of tiny positive impressions of how amazing these properties are, no matter how dated they seemed to you before.

FINAL: We pulled the map theme across everything from their massive trade show booth (back wall pictured above) to Powerpoint presentations. We also gave their team a host of logo lockups they could use wherever in the future. All predesigned and ready to go go go.

The final execution would all bloom (see what I did there?) from a new home page featuring a fanciful, illustrated map of an island filled with AGP’s properties. Visitors would click on any of the characters for a pop-up filled with info on that property along with its licensing opportunities. Kelly and I came up with a ton of fun taglines to support this idea, and they picked our favorite in the end – Happiness Happens Here. As they created new properties, we’d just add ‘em to the island. Once the site as approved and in production, I took the island I’d illustrated and pulled the concept through everything from their giant trade show booth to PowerPoint templates for presentations. The whole thing was modern, unconventional, bright and fun. Just the way AGP wanted to be thought of.

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

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