Print campaigns, and the site they pointed at
Ran in Variety, Cinefex and Blickpunkt; visits up 10%
Pixomondo is a visual effects studio, so its marketing runs on the calendar of the films and series it works on. I designed the campaigns around those releases and rebuilt the site they landed on. The redesign was what made launching the campaign on schedule possible at all.
Also in this role
- Monthly campaigns around studio releases in print and digital, ideated, mocked up and exported in Adobe Suite
- Built the site on a LEMP stack (CentOS, NGINX, MySQL, PHP) with a custom WordPress theme
Two jobs that were really one
On paper this role was two things: design the campaigns, and look after the website. In practice they were a single pipeline with a deadline attached to someone else’s release schedule.
A visual effects studio markets against the films and series it has worked on, so each campaign was pinned to a release date that wasn’t going to move. The work ran print and digital together. Art for the trade press, a matching hero update on the site, and a blog post to land alongside them.
The same spreads went out to Variety, Cinefex and Blickpunkt (the general industry paper, the visual effects journal, and the German market). Each piece had to hold up in three different editorial contexts without being redrawn for each.
The site was the bottleneck
The existing website couldn’t carry the campaign on the timeline available. So the redesign wasn’t a separate initiative that happened to coincide. It was a dependency. If the site wasn’t rebuilt, the ads had nowhere to point.
I met regularly with the CEO to agree the design direction, then built it: a LEMP stack (CentOS, NGINX, MySQL, PHP) with a WordPress theme written from scratch rather than adapted from a template, so the campaign layouts could be changed each month without fighting someone else’s assumptions.
Visits rose 10%, and the campaign launched on time.
Print doesn’t let you iterate
This is the only work I’ve done that couldn’t be changed after it shipped. No analytics, no patch, no second version. It goes to press at full size and that’s the artifact. You make the decisions before it exists rather than after, which is a different discipline from the one screens teach.