This ad is the result of a competition at my work to create a unique ad to pitch to a client. I decided to go with something interactive and fun. In this ad, the user is asked 3 questions which narrows down the perfect cupcake for them to try.

Detroit Medical Center was going to stop advertising with employer, so we needed some really high-end spec ads to win them back. This is one of the four that I made, which was successful in convincing them to stay, and won me a North Star Award for the design. This one used some sophisticated effects, like the pseudo-3D of the golf ball, and the water rippling effect of the river. The challenge was keeping this all within the tiny file size limit of 40 kilobytes.

This is a fun ad with a Mustang doing a burnout. Instead of animating it by hand, I did it programmatically, so that it will continue to slide around and pour out smoke without ever repeating the motion exactly. Due to the time limit of the website it would eventually run on, it’s set to stop after 15 seconds.

This was a very simple ad for a small town client, but I wanted to surprise them by giving them more than they expected. I illustrated a deer, and animated it moving realistically. Normally an ad like this would be static, but this helped draw the viewers’ attention.

Detroit Medical Center was going to stop advertising with employer, so we needed some really high-end spec ads to win them back. This is one of the four that I made, which was successful in convincing them to stay, and won me a North Star Award for the design. This one is a custom game that I programmed in Actionscript where a skateboarder jumps over cones and does tricks. It’s programmed to start very easy and slowly get harder and harder until the player eventually fails. When that happens, they are taken to the ER messaging.

The Detroit News marketing team wanted to make ads that were fun and quirky. To that end, I illustrated some humorous scenes in a cartoony style. They went over very well, but we eventually had to tone things down to make sure nobody got offended. This is the original, unedited version.

This was a complicated challenge. The client’s brand revolves around scantily clad servers in their restaurants, but our websites are family friendly, and we couldn’t show anything too risqué. So, I used a hand-illustrated beer mug and false camera/refraction effects to compromise.

This ad was created to promote the Detroit News coverage of the NCAA tournament. We had an interesting idea based around the use of the word “dance” as used in context of the tournament. I hand-illustrated the entire scene in vector, because a photo illustration would not fit in the file constraints of a web ad.

This ad was a lot of fun. We wanted to promote our college basketball coverage, and get the user to interact with the ad. When the ad loads, the ball is flying toward the basket in slow motion. There are three options – MSU, U of M, or no response. If a team is clicked, time speeds up and your team wins.

For this client, we wanted to stand out from other car ads, which are just a simple image and a lot of pricing/leasing information. I animated the headlights flashing on aggressively to grab the user’s attention and speak to the predatory nature of a jaguar.