Developing a Delightful Holiday Retail Look

Developing a Holiday Look for Retail

One of my favorite projects was developing the 2018 Holiday look for Things Remembered. Using the brand’s current look of cut paper props as inspiration, I developed an overall look, illustrations, layouts, and photography direction to develop a full look to work across all channels including a quicker digital process.

Developing the holiday look

Developing the holiday look involved a combination of typography, color palette, and illustration. Below are a few samples from the style guide.

Seasonal Photography Direction

In order to test this concept out, several sketches and test photographs were created to make sure the props worked with the product and to determine which product worked best with which prop. I then created some basic guidelines on how to execute photography for situations I wasn’t there to direct it. Here are some slides taking you from concept sketch, test image, and final results.

Seasonal in-store Creative

As part of developing the look, I had to consider a variety of in-store elements from window displays, shelf displays, die-cut signage, and 3-dimensional props. There are a lot of elements going on at the same time so the trick is to make them all feel cohesive, attention-getting, and follow the overall style. Here are select in-store elements I designed or photo-directed after developing the overall seasonal look. Click to enlarge.

MAKE-A-WISH WISHKID CAMPAIGN

Another fun and rewarding part of developing the seasonal look is the Make-A-Wish Wishkid Campaign, Things Remembered’s a yearly charitable effort in which a child was selected to be featured as the yearly Wishkid getting a feature in marketing collateral promoting the charitable effort.

This was the second Make-A-Wish Campaign I worked on in which I developed the overall look as well as directed the photoshoot. Wishkid Noah and his family were a delight to work with, he just radiated positivity and joy and it rubbed off on everyone around him.

Using the tree, lights, and snowflake elements from the overall look, I had them printed and die-cut to be used as 3-dimensional photo props.