H&L PARTNERS

I wish I could find the sketchbook I used during my time at H&L Partners because it held some fantastic stuff! But I can at the very least describe some of my process while working on some career-defining projects at H&L (formerly Hoffman Lewis, helmed by the brilliant Bob Hoffman).

I was hired for the newly created Interactive Art Director role for the Emerging Interactive team led by Andre de Castilho. As Flash was the interactive and rich media tool of the day, he had seen the range of imaginative projects I had created while at Betawave for clients like Cartoon Network, Disney, Proctor & Gamble, and more.

One of the first pieces I designed was known as a "tandem" display ad. Using DoubleClick's ad serving technology, individual display ads on a web page could now "talk" to each other (as an action takes place in one ad, a piece of code triggers a secondary action in another ad unit — all on the same page!). The creative possibilities were endless with innovative tools like this.

There's an example below (in the grouping of four ad treatments, bottom left) where a rocket flies across the top banner. A couple of burger patties appear in the rocket's wake, and float down to a second banner (which would be situated along the right gutter of a web page). The various burger elements would then drop into place to create the completed burger.

Ads like this were a huge hit and actually performed very well, given the reticence most of the public has for internet advertising, likely because they used new technology in an interesting and entertaining ways.

Humor sells. Whenever possible (and when the project allows for it) I try to imbue a sense of humor to my work. See the other example from this grouping of ads, bottom right. To draw attention to the fact that McDonald's was now in the iced coffee game I created, well, a game (!) based on the popular Angry Birds mobile game at the time. All of the art you see here was developed by me; in the game, you would use your mouse to launch the little ice cube and have it jump from one stack of penguins to the next with the final goal of reaching the cup of McDonald's iced coffee, where a pithy piece of copy would announce "McDonald's flavored iced coffee, $1.99. Sweet!". Again, the ad metrics on this were fantastic; the ad managers would always make a point to come over and tell me how an ad was performing.

Although this work is now 10 years old and a little dated — since Flash is no more and design methodologies have changed with the times — it is among some of the work I'm most proud of from a purely creative perspective. Things like responsive design, mobile and social media were in their infancy and I was thrilled to be at the forefront of that. I designed & developed numerous ad units, landing pages, microsites and more, including ad units used on LED screens at the Giants ballpark. My tenure at H&L was a creative touchstone of my career as a Designer and Director, a job where I couldn't wait to go to work each day to create something new and exciting!