Kern or die
The Book of Mormon takes up a special place in my designer’s heart; through this campaign, I grew from a Jr. AD to a lead designer during my 3-year tenure at “the sandwich shop.” I learned to kern massive amounts of critic-quotes & ad-copy (because our client loved everything justified), I learned the Tetris-like logic of building banners, I even held down my own mini-team of designers as we had so much Broadway work, we needed to hire two additional Jr. designers to enter the fire.
Although I wouldn’t really wanna work on this campaign ever again in my life, as I’ve had my fill of leaping mormons and ding’ing doorbells, I won’t ever forget the campaign that cut my teeth and honed my blade as a designer.
BOM-bastic banners
Display ads, AKA banner ads, AKA digital ads, AKA the thing I don’t see because of Ad-Block™. In the early 20-teens, banners were still the major source for online-advertising, and our client loved plastering big takeovers and tandem campaigns on both the New York Times and Broadway.com
I’ve done heaps of static banners, but those are boring for a portfolio, so here are a few of the progressives and splashy takeovers I’ve done for the Book of Mormon.
The Website
One of the things I learned about making live-theater based advertising was putting ticket information at the forefront of all online destinations. And when it’s for one of the hottest new shows on Broadway, the site needed to be a click away from getting butts into seats.
Still, because of the humor of the show, we wanted to have fun with the visuals. All throughout the site are little easter eggs, like hovering over a starburst might make it spin, or pressing on the doorbell will give an audible ding-dong. 3 years later, my original site design is still up and running (with a few tweaks here and there)! Click the orange button to check it out.
Humble Beginnings
In 2013, when Instagram was still its own company and poking people on Facebook was still a thing, social ads for a Broadway show was treated as a “nice to have” rather than the absolute necessity as it is today.
So take a trip down memory lane with some oldschool pin-wheel backed, IMPACT font type of memes, and check out the fun Book of Mormon tour BINGO cards – it was like a socially activated UGC campaign, only without any of the ease of use of an online image generator. Still, the assets look fun, all of which were done in Illustrator by yours truly.
more good stuff
