2019 Digital Design Trends

The trends for 2019 in digital design are bright, bold, and fun! These trends are helping big companies and small businesses alike. Here are some of the most relevant trends that you can utilize for your business.

BOLDER and More Colors:

The purpose of digital design is to send a message to the viewers. In an age where there is information thrown from every angle, there has to be a way to break through all of the other messages. That is where big and bold design excels. This trend is seen in both typography and in the use of colors. Here are two examples.

Branded Illustration & Gifs

Gifs have made a huge impact in the world – but so much so that their impact have lost its strength. A way that makes a gif impactful is by using gifs that are made specifically for your brand. These don’t have to be full production quality but instead can even be gifs made with apps like Boomerang for Instagram.

Branded Photos

Same as Gifs, the availability of stock photo markets have flooded our pages with generic photos. One way to break through all of those photos is to have photos taken for your brand that are well thought out. Just like gifs, photos are a way to show your audience who your brand is and what it is about.

Spotify Images

BTS: Jackson Chamber goes INTO the movies

Have you ever bitten off more than you can chew? When the first few pitches for the 2019 Jackson Chamber Annual Celebration video were left on the cutting room floor, one day remained. Being the genius I am, I suggested that we put the Chamber staff into old movies that revolved around the event’s nautical theme. Below I am going to do a breakdown of the process behind pulling this video off (this was a bit of a step up in difficulty over last year’s hit Carpool Karaoke).

1. Plan plan plan. We spent several hours planning out the video. This was key because we needed to find the right videos. It would not be as easy as selecting any scene from any nautical themed video, we needed certain scenes. What we discovered was that after a certain year of movies, the camera motion had gotten so loose, that it would be difficult to “green screen” people into movies. This limited our selection greatly and we were able to come up with just one scene more than was actually used in the project.

After we selected the scenes and received approval from the Jackson Chamber, we then went to work doing a scene breakdown. Each breakdown involved light placements, sound design, camera angles, costumes, props, dialogue, and scripting. Brittany Crockett on our team did a fantastic job of sourcing much of our costume work and props. She also worked with the Chamber staff on their dialogue.

2. Having the Right Equipment. To pull off this level of green screen project well, it took a lot of lighting and the appropriate green screens in addition to decent cameras and a space to work in. We even bought chroma green duct tape for the project!

3. Details, details, details. On the shoot days, we needed to be sure we got as close as we could to match the movement of the character in the scene, the camera angle, and the lighting. Though we had covered much of this in preproduction, it is another thing to make it work with actors on set. The Jackson Chamber staff were great sports during the entire process and we all had a good time. Particularly humorous was the Free Willy jump scene where Brittany got to spray me and Hannah with a hose while I moved an inflated whale with a broomstick taped to its back over Hannah’s head.

4. Time and After Effects. After the filming was done, the remainder of the work fell to team member Ricky Santos who spent a large amount of time in After Effects keying, scaling, content-aware filling the Chamber staff into these old movies.

During all of this process, we also managed to get some Behind the Scenes shots and with the help of Greg Hammond’s AV class at South Side High school, this BTS video was made:

https://vimeo.com/331256646

We also helped the Chamber with some display graphics for the event to help take things to the next level:

https://vimeo.com/325220365


Here is the full Annual Celebration Video:

https://vimeo.com/325209545

I guess a hotdog is a sandwich?

As Will Farrell as Harry Carry made us all aware: Hotdogs are items of deep mystery. If you were a hotdog, would you eat yourself? Is a hotdog a sandwich?

I want to tip my hat to Oscar-Mayer . Here’s a shoutout for a very clever marketing idea. On National Sandwich Day, Oscar-Mayer launched a (sadly) 24-hour hotline for people to call to talk about whether hotdogs were sandwiches or not.

People got a little heated and even other brands got involved. Jimmy Johns took up for sandwiches. In general it was a very fun promo, some folks had strong feelings about the issue:

How often does a brand stir controversy while keeping it family friendly and not a PR disaster? Almost never. They got people talking about their product and brand in a fun way and no harm was done. I think the part that made it really work was the inclusion of the “hotline.” A low cost but brilliant solution to help give people some fun way to engage!

 

Behind the Scenes at the Haunted Farm

Medina Haunted Farm

Things get a little spooky at Medina this time of year at the farm in Medina. This community event is created by the Medina Lions Club and has been going on for 40 years. Since it is run by a civic group, all the scarers are volunteers and all the funds go to support local charities. We did a number of things for this project but the primary piece was the video.

Shooting a video at a farm and in the woods in the dark away from electricity was a bit of a challenge. Luckily, we have invested in the Sony A7SII line of cameras that are renowned for there excellent low light capability. We also brought several battery-powered lights with us for the shoot. The ‘hero’ image of Pennywise walking through the forest was achieved with a battery-powered 120D and two Dracast LED panels and a fog machine. (The most unnerving thing of the whole night was that Pennywise didn’t break character even when we were shooting this scene.)

The scarers were all super great about being filmed and did a great job of working with us. While the production was tricky, everything was taken to the next level in editing. Editing to music helped make the scary footage even more terrifying.

This video had amazing organic results! With over 100 shares and 15,000 views in the first couple of days, it spoke to a few things:

1. The Community is invested in this project. It takes lots of folks from lots of different groups of people to put this on, which connects the project with lots of different tribes around the area. It is also entering its 40th year so that leaves a legacy to connect to.

2. This is the first year they have promoted the farm in this way. There is a novelty to this video. People seemed to really enjoy that.

3. The production value of the video made people excited about the farm. If we had shot this on a cell phone, people would not have been as interested in the content. The high production value makes it worth watching!

So without further ado, here is the video:

Medina Haunted Farm 2018 from Kevin Adelsberger on Vimeo.