OTDA: Drive In Another Dimension: 3D Experience

Agency: Dashboard Communications

Project Role: Lead Art Direction, Direct Mail Design, Campaign Look and Feel, City Map Planning and Storyboards, Project Management

Awards/Recognition: FWA Public Shortlist

The result of nearly 8 months of work; the Toyota Drive In Another Dimension campaign was my last project developed while at Dashboard and my proudest project – a result of tireless work from the OTDA Account team, programming department and creative department as well as all our 3rd party vendors. The project was an exercise in visual, audio and interactive excess. Part of a direct mail campaign and a website for the Ontario Toyota Dealers focused on promoting coupons for lapsed and existing Toyota owners. With a print run of over a quarter million for the direct mail piece and over 400,000 branded 3D glasses it was one of the largest projects I’ve ever lead. The additional glasses were sent to Ontario’s 78 Toyota Dealerships to have on hand when customers visit over the promotional period. The direct mail piece was a parts and service focused folded print piece designed for viewing in traditional stereoscopic 3D with the attached branded 3D glasses (so people would look at it and keep it).

The piece pushed users to the site which was developed in both 2D CGI and stereoscopic 3D CGI and featured an aerial perspective city users could drive through in search of offers. Attached to each offer we developed narrated, demonstrative videos focused on showing users what the offer entailed and the benefits to getting the service. Part of the OTDA’s Parts and Service ongoing mission to bring brand and information to customers alongside retail offers. Once users collected the offers they could drive to the dealership to finish the game and redeem their coupons. While at the dealership they could also share their time, retry or chose to cruise the city with no timer. For those who wanted to continue driving we threw in Easter eggs like Toyota messaging on billboards, the ability to change your car’s colour, horns and full environmental audio effects, brake marks when at high speed and the ability to drive off road finding shortcuts.

During our QA development we handed out glasses to the entire company and asked them to test the site in a companywide QA session. And due to excitement from the OTDA board we had the opportunity to present it directly to a boardroom of Toyota Canada International employees at their Toronto offices. Some of the best comments we heard during launch and shortly after included people receiving the direct mail piece and having their children pull them to their computer to play and see the site in 3D, high site traffic (numbers to come) and people saying it was challenging but highly addictive.

Site: www.toytoa3d.ca

Ontario Toyota Dealers 2010 Site Redesign

Agency:Dashboard Communications

Project Role: Lead Art Direction, Site Frame Work Redesign, Project Management

Capping off an very rewarding 3 years working on the Ontario Toyota Dealers client at Dashboard I was able to help in bringing forward a much needed redesign of the realtoyota.ca web site bringing out a new home page, new vehicle details pages and photo galleries – while still maintaining some of the older content the site was known for such as the past video walk-arounds, parts and service sections and dealer locator (which had be done at a previous time by various Dashboard team members). The key reason for this site redesign was to bring the site up to modern online requirements by building a flexible architecture that was built with evolution in mind. Unlike it’s predecessor which was build in flash over 4 years earlier this site was built in HTML with CSS and a collapsible architecture allowing for new sections and pages to be easily added or removed. The pages are made to grow as long as needed for any content and can support dynamic, static or video content easily. A major benefit was also the addition of social bookmarking, direct printing components and the always important SEO friendly content strategy. Bringing the OTDA into a modern online digital realm.

The home page was build to aggregate site content. To bring forward content within the site and offer easily updatability. So when a new offer came down from the dealers or a change was need it would be possible vary quickly. We felt there was a lot of good content including video walk-arounds, parts and service information and promotional content that was previously buried. The structure allowed us to bring that content forward.

Finally, in-depth research in user interaction was integrated into the entire site flow to build a streamlined experience. These updates included visual main navigation, descriptive tool tips on rollovers to give users context of what they would click through too, descriptive live text with banners and placement of content along the fold. By putting various content purposely on the fold we force the user’s curiosity to explore and scroll down the pages that are longer – ensuring they experience all content on each page.

Future phases of the site will included an updated dynamic dealer-locator and additional sections focused on social communication between customer and dealer. These additions will hopefully be built in at a future date by the hardworking team at Dashboard.

Site: www.realtoyota.ca

Since late 2009 I’ve been working on and off on my largest painting ever and documenting it step by step on my fan page for fans. Follow me and watch as the work progresses. Series idea: The series is a collection of visual scapes about the future rediscovery of Walt Disney World by a new culture…the mind wonders!

http://www.facebook.com/toddlawsonart

http://www.facebook.com/toddlawsonart

LCBO Deflate the Elephant 3D Design

Agency:Dashboard Communications and Due North

Project Role: CGI Elephant: 3D Design, Modeling, Skeletal Rig, Texture Design and Character Animation

For the second time in 2009 I had the chance to delve back into my 3D CGI roots for this one and modeled, designed, textured, rigged and animated this 3D elephant in Maya based on a real world inflatable elephant developed by Due North for their commercial spot. It was a fun challenge that took me back to some of the ATI character modeling days (though a simpler model) and was delivered in under 2 weeks on an alpha channel for creative and dev.

Site: www.deflatetheelephant.com

Toyota Canada’s 09 Fall Promotional Campaign: “More For You”

Agency: Dashboard (Digital), Dentsu (Traditional)

Project Role: Lead Art Director, Designer, & Managed Production

Dentsu approached Dashboard with an opportunity to work on our first national Toyota sales program after seeing the work we have and continue to demonstrate digitally for the Ontario Toyota Dealers Association. Built in a whirlwind time line over August we developed an online concept to feature 6 key vehicles and offers with supporting facts. The “Did you know?” facts related to each vehicle to inform users with things they may have not known about Toyota as a brand and about each individual vehicle. Simple, clean and flexible for future rate changes that are expected to happen over the course of the 3 month promotion – the micro site is a first for Toyota in the digital realm for a promotion (instead of a new model release platform). Accompanying the site we developed a series of both standard and expandable banners sharing the facts and car details in two languages (english/french) across Canada.

Site: View the site

Rebranding Hellmanns.ca

Agency: Dashboard Communications

Project Role: Lead Art Director, Designer, & Managed Production

This summer we streamlined the Canadian brand site for Hellmann’s to focus on very clean design and universal programming via CSS, HTML, Java, Database – no flash. The idea of the site is simple: an adjustable destination for the client to show 3 main focuses: recipes that use Hellmann’s products, information on Hellmann’s product line of consumables and any current as well as past activations. A simple and pretty design built to give the user a warm “kitchen, at home” feeling focused on food and brand messaging.

Site: hellmanns.ca

Kicking of the Real Food Movement

Agency: Dashboard Communications

Project Role: Lead Art Director, Designer, & Managed Production

Awards/Recognition: Applied Arts Interactive Award 2009

A punch and then a hug. A phrase that coined this projects entire system. The Real Food Movement is a plea to support local foods in Canada for a better economy, neighbourhood, and future. To demonstrate this we use an intriguing intro video delving into the facts of Canada’s state of food (the punch) followed by the solution: 4 simple steps to help you eat local in an environment rich with positivity and education (taking action, finding local food, asking your grocer to shelf more local food, making recipes with local ingredients). These steps along with a wealth of ways to share the word of the movement help contribute to reaching a goal of 100,000 actions at which point Hellmann’s would donate $25,000 to Evergreen. All of this happens within an interactive map of Canada.

Over the course of three months Dashboard developed one of their largest and most complex sites to kick off the 2009 Hellmann’s Real Movement. After a very challenging project the entire dashboard team (dev, creative and account) pulled closer together through a whirlwind development cycle that resulted in one of my proudest moments as an art director to see eatrealeatlocal.ca launch so close to the original creative idea and a very happy client. The site demonstrates various new techniques for dashboard including being the first fully fledged flash 10 site using the 3D motion controls and facebook connect to allow users to post directly to their facebook profiles.

Site: eatrealeatlocal.ca

Sunlight Laundry 2009 Refresh and “What do you see?” Promotion

Agency:Dashboard Communications

Project Role: Lead Art Director, Designer, Motion, 3D Design & Managed Production

For the first quarter of 2009 much of my time was spent on developing a site refresh including a digital campaign for “What do you see?” on sunlightlaundry.ca. Focusing on bringing once buried content to the forefront and cleaning up the home page to be purely activation focused – the site relaunched in March. The project broke down into two distance areas: the Activity/Stain Modules – which housed over a hundred combined tips and articles on how to remove stains and activities for every occasion in a clean, concise and organized format – and the What do you see?” promotion – which featured a series of CGI animations with interactivity to deliver a fresh new site. To add to user engagement the abilities to rate, comment, email and print the Activities and Stain Tips where also included.

I had the chance to delve back into my 3D CGI roots for this one and modeled/designed the washing machine myself in Maya. CGI animation and sound were developed by motion artist Dave Zak in a very collaborative effort. I was Excited to deliver a fully developed update of this size in a relatively short time span.

Site: sunlightlaundry.ca

Ontario Toyota Dealers Klick Club Direct Mail

Agency: Dashboard Communications

Project Role: Lead Art Direction, Design & Managed Production.

As a continuation of 2008 planning – the Ontario Toyota Dealers and Dashboard designed an envelope, reminder letter, offer letter, email blast series and a magnet die-cut sheet for the kids. The idea supporting this campaign focused on the “magnetic” personalities of Toyota technicians and the quality of their work and dedication to service literally pulling or attracting Toyota owners back. Using this idea we developed a series of rules to live by to improve the relationship with your Toyota: The Rules of Attraction.

Various collection of dimensional work including painted skateboards and vinyl toys. To see more of the latest – the 2008 swim team munnies – visit my facebook fan page.