While Sylvan Learning corporate headquarters designs national advertising campaigns, each franchise is responsible for local and regional marketing. To maximize ROI, a variety of mediums, both print and digital, are used at different times throughout the year: banners, posters, billboards, brochures, flyers, mailers, postcards, and email marketing.

Client: Sylvan Learning Franchises

Role: Concept, Design, Finished Art, Retouching

Category: Print Design, Digital Design, Web Design, Brand Identity, Marketing collateral

More information, materials, and resources for the Common Natives of Indiana project can be found on my website at http://www.shawnpsullivan.com/nativeindiana

I love to garden, and recently decided to look for books to introduce my daughters to gardening and the importance of native plants to our ecosystem. However, I couldn’t find any I liked. Therefore, I decided to create my own booklet that could be distributed free of charge to elementary school teachers to be utilized in the classroom. It is designed for 3-5 grade readers, but all ages will find the facts and descriptions fun and useful. I partnered with Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center for the photographs and the parks departments of five Indiana cities to discover the most popular native flowers in their parks so students all over the state can explore their communities and find these flowers.

Upon showing the initial flower booklet to some school teachers to get their input, the response I most often received was, “I want to keep a set in my classroom library!” I inquired if they would be interested in a series of booklets and resources about the native flora and fauna of Indiana, to which the response was an overwhelming, “YES!”. My initial booklet on native flowers has now expanded to include trees and birds. In addition to the booklets, I have created a series of posters to highlight three of the plants or animals in each booklet. These posters are reminiscent of the WPA travel posters produced from 1936-1943 by the use of colors to imitate the silkscreen or woodcut process. I chose the WPA posters as inspiration not only for their overall aesthetic qualities, which I love, but also because they are commonly known for their depiction of nature and the outdoors and for their conservation purposes.

Client: Common Natives of Indiana - MFA project

Role: Art Direction, Design, Retouching, Finished Art, Research

Mutual Savings Bank needed marketing materials ranging from full-page color ads for local magazines, to newspaper ads, to postcards, to counter mats. They wanted a clean, modern look for their new campaign.

Client: Mutual Savings Bank

Role: Concept, Design, Finished Art, Retouching

Category: Print Design, Marketing collateral

A local Rotary Club chapter wanted a new travel banner. These banners are exchanged whenever a member visits another chapter anywhere in the world. As such, a local chapter could have upwards of a hundred banners hanging at their meetings. This banner needed to stand out among other banners, and be able to tell the values of their chapter and story of their town, all in a single glance.

Client: Rotary Club #3436

Role: Concept, Art Direction, Design, Finished Art

Agency: Freelance Project

Category: Banner

The client wanted a tri-fold brochure to be able to, primarily, put into folders given out by local moving companies and real estate agents, but also to market in general. He was looking for a more modern feel that incorporated his type of business and made it stand out from the generic tri-fold brochures and flyers that many of his competitors seem to use.

Client: Legacy Painting

Role: Concept, Layout, Design, Finished Art, Retouching

Category: Print Design, Marketing collateral

The client approached me for a new logo. After meeting and talking with the partners, I decided to design a logo with a more modern feel that would well represent their personalities and atmosphere of the firm. The strokes of color are inspired in part by the old visual of accountants wearing translucent green visors. The red and blue color were already the colors of the firm, but the blue color was placed on the bottom as the color blue inspires trust, and trust is the foundation of Chamberlin & Taylor. The font was chosen for its sense of refinement yet ease of readability.

The client later approached me again to create business cards and stationery for them. The client also wanted a banner that would showcase some of their services that could be displayed at trade shows. 

Client: Chamberlin & Taylor, LLP

Role: Art Direction, Layout, Design, Finished Art

Category: Logo Design, Print Design, Brand Identity, Marketing collateral

The Joffrey Ballet of Chicago, IL hosted a fundraising benefit gala in which they were auctioning off various experiences and packages. They wanted to be able to welcome everyone, start the auction, and begin bidding for each item with a preview that did not detract from the elegance and sophistication of the evening.

Client: Joffrey Ballet

Role: Concept, Design, Art Direction

Agency: Post Effects

The “Year-End Celebration” commercials for Texas Ford were originally going to contain standard live-action video shots. However, after shooting the video, it was decided to go in a different creative direction. The video shots would still be used, but now with various fly-throughs and a universal background. I was brought in to rotoscope (remove the existing background) for all of the live-action shots (in B&W, plus Texas flag) so they could be repurposed into three different commercials, as well as to assist with compositing.

Client: Texas Ford

Role: Rotoscoping, Compositing

Agency: ki edit + design

At the end of a commercial for the Illinois lottery, there was a nice shot of a hanging Christmas ornament outside in the snow, while the details and fine print of the offer was shown. Why use a plain, ordinary ornament in your commercial? Use the opportunity to feature your logo one last time! 

In a second commercial, a couple was wanted to be featured celebrating and eating in a bistro in Paris. Unfortunately for the actor and actress, it was not in the budget to actually send them to Paris. Instead, they were shot in front of a green screen and a photo of the Eiffel Tower was superimposed in the background. The director thought it would be more intimate and romantic if it were nighttime and the Eiffel Tower was lit up. However, licensing restrictions only allowed for a photo taken during the day. I was tasked to alter the photo into nighttime shot, as realistic as possible. In the end, I did too good of a job! My final photo, while an altered day time shot, was deemed too realistic and therefore was not used in fear that doing so could lead to a lawsuit if used in the commercial.

Client: IL Lottery

Role: Finished Art, Retouching, Logo Addition

A commercial for an Infiniti M35 was supposed to feel dark, sophisticated and elegant. However, when the video was shot, everyone failed to notice that the GPS system was set to the bright daytime setting, which really drew the eye. That’s not what potential buyers were supposed to focus on! That GPS screen had to go! The nighttime setting was much darker and fit with the intended tone of the commercial.

Client: Infiniti

Role: Finished Art, Screen Replacement

Agency: Somersault

This project is my personal favorite! Back in 2005 I decided to propose to my now wife. But how to do it? Cool Runnings is Monique’s favorite movie, and I’m in the graphics business. Put the two together, and I came up with the idea of replacing background (or foreground) graphics throughout Cool Runnings with proposals. However, it kind of back fired in that she didn’t see a single one! At the beginning of the movie I was nervous waiting for her to see one of them and say something. By the end of the movie I was nervous that she had seen them but was ignoring them! But no. She didn’t see a single one of my TWENTY clever proposals. Now to be honest, at the beginning of the movie I did make some of them hard to spot. I wanted to be able to say I had to wear her down and ask her several times. But halfway through the movie one of them was the focus of the whole shot (the jumbotron!) Finally, on proposal number twenty, I paused the film and she finally noticed it, at which point I got down on one knee and proposed. Talk about wearing her down! Here are nine of my favorites. Can you spot the proposals?

Client: Personal Project

Role: Concept, Design, Retouching, Compositing, Finished Art

The first group of photos is of a personal art project that I created in Photoshop by, in part, combining three photographs. I wanted to create a magical Christmas moment of my daughter meeting Santa Claus.

The second group of photos is of two designs I created for some gifts for friends who, like myself, love to read. They were printed on t-shirts and mugs, and I used Adobe Illustrator to customize the fonts.

The final set of photos was for a presentation I gave to the Business Exchange Team in Franklin, IN about graphic design. To start the presentation off, I decided to use the ice breaker “two truths and a lie”, complete with photographic evidence! After the crowd guessed which was a lie, I showed the original photograph. These were a few of my favorite “lies”: meeting Stephen King outside of his house in Maine, meeting Victor Oladipo and Tom Crean while at a Bloomington high school for Sylvan, and that my two daughters were twins.