The Meridian Signage for a condominium real estate new development located in Suffern, NY.

Suffern, New York is a really wonderful place to live and work. Its main thoroughfare Lafayette Avenue is reminiscent of the scenery in a Norman Rockwell illustration. The Village of Suffern is known for the historic and beautifully restored Lafayette movie theater which is complete with its own working Wurlitzer organ used during the screening of vintage silent films. For this Graphic Designer, though, the town’s main marquee is the sign near the condominium building known as The Meridian.

This sign was a fun project to work on because the campaign was built from the ground up. Meaning, the development’s logo and entire marketing campaign needed to be designed from scratch. The name “Meridian” conjured nautical imagery based on its association with navigation. Therefore the logo design incorporated a compass rose as the mark. You can see this and other logo design samples in the corresponding portfolio section of this website, by clicking here.

The sign’s design is fairly simple. The primary element is the logo set over a burgundy background, which was the main color in the Meridian’s graphic design system.  Meanwhile the, only supporting color utilized is the Meridian’s cream color. This allows the contact information and Better Homes and Gardens Rand Realty logo to stand out clearly in black. The only other design elements in the sign are a few of the condominium’s features and the address.

Because the Meridian sign was intended for only temporary use as a marketing piece, little thought was put into its shape or the materials it was produced with. Instead, size was the sign’s key importance. The sign was created using a four color grand format UV print mounted to a 10 foot by 5 foot sheet of Alumalite and installed on two painted 4×4 posts.

For those unfamiliar with materials Alumalite is a composite substrate consisting of an interior corrugated plastic core sandwiched between two sheets of aluminum. This material is ideal for promoting real estate new development projects because of its durability, lightweight and relative low cost. Its lifespan is not as long as other materials, but for use in real estate marketing it lasts for the duration of most marketing campaigns. The largest size sheet of Alumalite available is 10 foot by 5 foot. Although this size would be too small for readability on the side of an interstate, in a small town like Suffern, it really is quite large.

For Graphic Designers and Art Directors, one of the most validating things in life is to walk past one’s own work. Living in Suffern, this Art Director has the opportunity to walk past a labor of love on a regular basis. It’s rough being a practitioner of the disposable arts, though. As the Meridian Development has almost completely sold out (a good sign for a successful campaign) this sign will be dismantled sooner than I like to think.

Thinking of Selling? We'll showcase your home on all of the top national and local real estate websites. This is a variable direct mail post card for use in the real estate industry.

Creating an engaging direct mail post card design can be a challenging task. Especially in the field of real estate where postcard designs are most often simply a photo of a MLS listing along with a brief description of the property on the back. The above design breaks the mold of standard real estate postcard designs.

The Thinking of Selling concept pictured above promotes Better Homes and Gardens Rand Realty’s listing syndication through social media and real estate websites such as Facebook, Trulia, Realtor.com and Zillow, to name just a few. A stock photo of a laptop computer was used to drive home the fact that this message is about an information technology service that the company offers. The real estate websites logos were then assembled in Adobe Illustrator and warped to match the laptop photo’s perspective in Adobe Photoshop. The Laptop was also silhouetted in Photoshop so that it could then be imported into Adobe InDesign and placed over Rand Realty’s standard grass/sky background branding image. The text was also written and typeset in InDesign and the logo was placed in the top right corner in accordance with Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate’s branding standards.

To ensure a cohesion between the front and back of the postcards the grass/sky image was used again as a background for the text. The body copy on the back further drives home the point to the card’s audience the significance of getting the potential lead’s home on as many websites as possible.

Better Homes and Gardens Rand Realty utilizes a direct mail vendor with the ability to create postcards with variable text and photos. This gives their agents the opportunity to include all of their contact information along with headshot on the card. They also could customize the message on the back of the card to suit their needs.  This all ads up to an effective direct mail campaign. The postcard was so successful and popular with the real estate agents that the design was modified and resized to run in several of the Hudson Valley region’s publications as a branding ad.

Branding ad for Better Homes and Gardens Rand Realty

Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate has created a large number of videos for the purpose of attracting a web audience to their site. These videos are also a great opportunity for the company to increase brand awareness, so they opted to create some on-air marketing to promote them. Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate then in turn syndicates the videos out to their Franchisee’s. Rand Realty used the opportunity to drive some more web traffic from their print campaign in a few local publications in Westchester and the Hudson Valley with the print ad displayed on the left.

The Power of Color certainly appeals to a graphic designer’s sensibilities. This video explains the basic principles of color theory and how to apply it in interior design. I also clearly used some color theory in the design of the ad. Three instances of Better Homes and Gardens green were placed over a black and white CAD rendered image adhering to the law of thirds. This has resulted in a logo that really stands out and text that is easily readable.

While working on this project I was both under time and budgetary constraints so I used my trusty flatbed scanner for the image of the fanned out Pantone book. This, of course, required some moderate retouching and color correction in Photoshop. The background image, Pantone book, logo and text were all assembled into the final design using Adobe InDesign. Certainly a fun project to work on and the end results make for a great looking ad.

Cover for catalog insert in the Wall Street Journal promoting the new "Distinctive Collection" luxury real estate brand created in Adobe InDesign

Realogy’s Better Homes and Gardens franchise has dropped their Premier Selections luxury brand and replaced it with the Distinctive Collection brand. It was perfect timing for Better Homes and Gardens Rand Realty as they entered their spring market campaign. The Rands decided to promote their extensive inventory of luxury homes with a catalog insert in the Wall Street Journal.

Being such a high profile marketing campaign it was incredibly important that the cover use a highly compelling photograph. Conveniently Rand Realty had just struck up a new relationship with Edberg Marketing. Edberg specializes in real estate photography and has the capability of taking elevated photographs.

Simply put, elevated photography raises a camera on an extending mast and tethers the camera to the operating photographer on the ground. The photographer has some limited ability to pivot the camera in order to get the correct angle. However, due to the height the mast often sways in the wind causing some motion blur on many of the exposures.

The Distinctive Collection cover proved to be a very complicated shoot for a variety of reasons. The first reason being that, as always in the world of marketing, we were on tight time frame. The time factor was further compounded by the terribly wet spring that prevailed in 2011. Edberg was forced to try and make the shot in iffy weather at least three times before they finally got some decent light. A second complication was that Edberg was unable to take a vertical photo due to the way that the camera mounts on the elevated mast. Typically in real estate photography this wouldn’t be an issue because horizontal compositions tend to be the preferred format. Unfortunately, Edberg was only able to mount an EOS Rebel on the mast, so a horizontal photo did not hold the required resolution for a high quality cover photo. After a great deal of back and fourth Eric Ortner finally was able to figure out a solution to the problem. With a great deal of reluctance on their part Eric managed to get Edberg to release him the Raw CR2 files. He then opened them in Photoshop at the largest Raw settings effectively faking in resolution. This gave resulted in a large enough pixel dimension to create a hi-res cover photo.

The work didn’t stop there however. Due to the home’s foliage there was a great deal of retouching required. The tree in the front of the house cast unsightly shadows all over the front of the house. The solution, remove the tree and shadows in Photoshop. This required about three hours of retouching. As we all know though, a cover photo with blemishes might as well not be printed. This is especially true when pitching to a luxury market, where everything must be perfect. The following examples are the before and after of the retouched photos.

Original photo with branches and shadows obscuring the front of the home.

Photoshop Retouched cover photo which removes the tree's branch and shadows.

The Distinctive Collection cover proved to be a rather hi-stress project, but in the end it resulted in a great quality high impact presentation piece.

Flyer Promoting the Hudson Heartbeat Video Contest

On April 1, 2011  Better Homes and Gardens Rand Realty released its new lifestyle blog dedicated to Westchester and the Hudson Valley. The goal of the site was to further enhance Search Engine Optimization as well as awareness of  RandRealty.com by generating traffic from an audience that wasn’t necessarily looking to purchase real estate. One chief component of the site is user generated community profile videos in the spirit of social media. What better way to garner this sort of video content than through a video contest. The flyer above was designed to entice a youthful and creative audience to enter their work in the video contest. The flyer’s design also closely follows the general design system used for on-air advertising promoting Hudson Heartbeat. This was done to reinforce the sites brand identity. The flyer has been posted in colleges and areas where young creative types may be found. This design was created entirely in Adobe Illustrator and will also be used on postcards and possibly print ads.