Reveal: what’s behind it

As you know, we choose a new word each month (or roughly month-sized group of days, they don’t always line up with the calendar month) to focus our marketing efforts. This month’s word is Reveal, which means we’ll be doing a few behind the scenes things, taking a look at what analysis can show about your marketing, letting our newest teammates show off a little and generally getting to the bottom of things.

As art director, these monthly theme changes are a great opportunity to do some encapsulated design. For each month I need a Facebook header, a webpage banner, several blog images and an email newsletter header (sign up and see it soon). The more content we create the more little pieces I need, but my real focus always starts with the web banner at the top of dtrio.com. This month I played with the idea of using a flasher (too cheeky), paper being torn away to reveal what’s behind it (too done a thousand times already, including by me), a stage curtain (nice, but a bit boring and a little weird when I tried to apply the bold colors of our brand to it). I finally settled on some way of showing the basic components of light or ink, the visible color spectrum, the cmyk values that lie behind the visual expression of our work. As typography plays a key role in our brand expression, what better way to illustrate the concept of ‘reveal’ than to use the type itself as the window to what lies behind everything we do? So I used the typeset of the word reveal to mask through to a striking image of colored ribbons behind it. And the ‘reveal’ identity was born.

We all hope you enjoy this month’s content, including the first installment of our new video feature Cage Match. Tim and Beth square off on what makes the perfect bloody mary. What does the perfect bloody mary have to do with marketing, you ask? Not a lot, but as marketers we tend to pull everything apart to it’s components and talk every possibility to death. Sometimes it makes for an entertaining fight and we thought you might like to see. Have fun, and let us know what you think.

-Beth Seitzberg is the art director at d.trio marketing group