Turnkey Merchandise Programs, LLC manages multiple merchandise sites, and its four biggest are Campbell Soup Company, Kellogg’s, USA Hockey, and Imagine Toys. My supervisor asked me to create web assets for e-gift-cards in the store and matching e-mail header graphics. I designed both year-round and winter holiday asset sets.
All of the cards and headers were designed exclusively in Adobe Illustrator. I had access to any brand standards documents each of the companies had, to ensure my designs fell within guidelines for the year-round assets. Because of the volume of winter holiday cards I needed to generate (three pre-set dollar amounts for three different holiday messages), I made reusable designs, at the request of my supervisor. The illustrations comprise semitransparent designs in varied white tones (with some grays) arranged on top of one colored layer. The logo was included in uncluttered corners appropriate for any of the stores’ logos to occupy. The colored layer could easily be changed and therefore easy to customize for the different stores by choosing three official brand colors to denote dollar amounts.
Each year Campbell Soup Company sells Christmas merchandise, including an ornament with a new design, based on vintage official art of their Campbell Kids™. The file needs to be vector art, for a screen printing onto the bulb, but still retain qualities of the vintage art, particularly the kids’ rosy cheeks. TMP designs and mails out a physical order form because a significant portion of their clientele prefers that to internet ordering.
I used Adobe Illustrator for all the illustrations, as well as the layout of the form. Based on direction from my advisers at TMP, I adapted old official art of kids decorating a snowman into a tree decorating scene. I used some reference clip art for how to approach the snow’s shapes on the tree, but drew the lights, box, and banner from scratch. On the mailer, I designed the houses myself and used a photo reference for the wagon.
Imagine Kids is an online-only toy store run by Turnkey Merchandise Programs, LLC. At the time, they wanted to have some simple graphic illustrations of kids playing, some generic and some for certain times of year. The illustrations needed to have a unified style, as well, that could potentially be mimicked by other designers in the future. Most of the illustrations were intended for multiple uses, on both social media pages, banner ads, email headers, and possibly as reduced-opacity elements in the store’s own website background.
My instructions were as simple as “Halloween” “Thanksgiving” and “winter time” so I developed those themes as interestingly as I could while maintaining the simplicity of the style. I take particular pride in all the different halloween costumes, especially the owl (which is their mascot) and the tube of toothpaste.
During my time at Turnkey Merchandise Programs, LLC, I was occasionally asked to use my expertise in vector illustration to take a sketch from the client or another creative and transform it into a file fit for printing on shirts or mugs.
The first two designs were created for the Michigan Humane Society’s merchandise website. The business team at TMP brainstormed ideas for the client based on popular products they had seen in the zeitgeist. They simply presented me with the concepts, giving me full creative reign for the first draft of the design and only requesting some minor changes between that and the finished product.
The latter four images show the final outcomes of some apparel graphics I vectorized and fine-tuned for the US Lacrosse merchandise store. I received rough sketches from another creative for both of these concepts, which I then scanned, traced, and fine-tuned the vector files before handing them off to the business team to order the printed merchandise.
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