House, Photos, and Photoshop

Often times in the selling of new homes builders will show homes under construction, because that’s all they have to show. The following is just one of many photos I created or manipulated to show what the final home would look like. In this way customers find it easier to visualize their new home.

This home was in a rural neighborhood which was still in development. As of yet there were no paved roads or gutters.

The Original Photo

First - I removed the car, built the small rock wall, and cleaned up the yard.

Second - the cloudy sky had to go. Southern New Mexico has around 300 clear days a year. Leaving the clouds would have been as much of a misrepresentation as actually removing them.

 


Finally - the driveway, gutter, and paved road. This was done by shooting photos of roads and pavement that would match the real thing.

Thurston Homes - Marketing Artwork

Customer - Thurston Homes

Date - August 2004

Job - Ad for the Real Estate Weekly

Design Tools - Digital Camera, Photoshop, and Pagemaker

Since September 1997 we have owned and managed Bob Stovall Printing, and have been blessed with the glories and stresses of self-employment, however from September 2002 to September 2004 I had the good fortune of being the Director of Marketing for Thurston Homes in Las Cruces, New Mexico. As such I oversaw the sales and marketing of new residential custom built homes. A list of my duties and responsibilities are listed below;

·      Oversaw the advertising design, and marketing of the company. This included newspaper, magazines, radio, web, and TV.

·      Designed and manned open houses, entertaining customers and potential clients.

·      Designed brochures, signs and material needed to inform customers of the essential information that they needed to make informed and reliable decisions.

·      Met with clients face to face, helped them choose and design custom house plans that would best fit their needs for years to come.

·      Helped walk customers unfamiliar to the finance and home mortgage, through the process, by going to meet with their bank or mortgage officer.

·      Was in charge of writing up customer contracts and work orders, which required great detail to insure production as to how and where the customer homes would be built.

·      Helped the company sell more new homes than in any previous years, through quality market research of customer, finance needs, property, and home features.

The following are a few ads that appeared in the local Real Estate magazines. The mother and children were from some stock photos I had; all the other photos were of my taking, or of my creation.

Design Notes:

Peaceful Valley - (the above ad)

When creating artwork, for a home that does not even exist yet, we find it a bit of a challenge. People like to see what they are getting; they need help visualizing their possibilities. This is the case with Peaceful Valley, a subdivision about 24 miles outside of Las Cruses in a community called Rincon, New Mexico. The photo for this ad was a creation of what it would possibly look like while relaxing on your back porch. At this time all we had was lots under development, so taking a photo of the valley looking toward the east, I combined it with a staged photo of models on a porch with a stucco wall, in Photoshop. I also added a shadow to give it a more relaxed look and feel.

Building It Right!

This was one of the best ads we ran and versions of this ad ran for nearly 6 months in several different publications. When people in production speak of lean management, value engineering, or TQM we tend to think these methodologies belong only with manufacturing and production. I beg to differ, all these principles apply to design, specifically Value Engineering which examines the function of a part, process, or application. When designing a piece of artwork you really should know why each piece is there and what its function is. Note that each part of this design has a specific purpose; I will list some of the highlights;

·      Thurston Homes – the name is easily recognized and on edge so that when someone is thumbing through a magazine for our ad, it is easily found.

·      Building it Right – this title conveys the message of the builder’s desire to quality from the very start.

·      Picture of the Model Home – lets people know where they can come to see us.

·      Pictures of the construction process – let people know they just don’t walk-in, buy a home, and walk out.

·      Picture of the couple – lets potential home buyers know that they can see the building of their home from the very beginning and continue to inspect it throughout the entire process.

·      The Map – our office was in a rural neighborhood where the construction was. The streets were all new and were most likely not on any map.

·      Dare to Compare – any builder can give you walls and home furnishings, however we built for energy efficiency and thus required different construction methods from the very beginning. In a Check List fashion we invite people to compare each of these items with other builders, educating the public on the options they can have.

·      Ken Thurston – Builder – no matter how impersonal work can get, it is important to remember that behind this company are real people working hard to build homes for other real people, and we care.

·      Yellow pad & Pencil – both items work to visually convey the message of action. Don’t just read it, get out your paper and pencil and take notes, compare and start doodling. That’s where homes start.

·      Picture of the sign – name recognition helps link our ad with our signs around the area.

·      Background – this is stucco right off the side of a home giving an interesting feel and connection to our end product.

·      The Dog – suggesting the warm and fuzzy feelings of a home.

Great Homes, Great Locations, . . .

This is a full two page spread that can be used as one full piece or as two separate ads in the same publication, giving a little more exposure as people flip through the magazine.

All I can say about my work with Thurston Homes is, we must have been doing something right, because the developer had a lot of trouble keeping building lots available for the amount of contracts we were signing.

Designing a Bottle Label

Customer - Leal's Mexican Foods, Inc.

Date – January 2000

Job – Salsa Bottle Labels

Design Tools - Photoshop, and PageMaker

Design Notes:

A few years ago I was asked to design a bottle label for some salsa for a local restaurant that was having their traditional salsa bottled to be sold in the local retail stores. The family owned business was well respected and their salsa was requested often by the many patrons of their restaurant.

They had no specific ideas about the design, but the natural requirements of meeting the regulations of the food industry, like listing the nutritional facts, ingredients, bar code, and so on, leaving the design up to me to impress them. I agreed and said I would come up with a few ideas for them to look at.

I can’t really begin to cover all the pre-design processes and steps of coming up with the design concept other than to say it took several days of devoted effort. First I took a little trip to a couple of the local stores where the product would be sold and thus it would be on display. I wanted to get a sense of how the isle would look with one more brand of salsa.

      What would make this new salsa stand out?

      Would it be pleasing to the eye, as someone

            looked across the different choices?

      If I didn’t know the name of the restaurant what

            would cause me to desire to purchase it?

      What are the reasons I would even be buying salsa?

Going to the different stores, noting my observations, and then sampling a few friends on their feelings about salsa in general, when and how they used it and so on took several hours. Overall it didn’t take a lot of time; however the value of the information I gathered and the success of its use continues to grow even today.

     

The product was easily recognized, and unlike many other labels that are cluttered with graphics of vegetables the name captures the attention at first glance. I found, a lot of people buy salsa when they are having a party or gathering so I scattered light colors of confetti on a rustic adobe tan background. I also recommended that the name of the salsa be called “Salsa Festiva” meaning “Party Salsa” in Spanish. Finally, I found that a lot of people are very picky about their salsa and most love fresh homemade salsa. So instead of simply abusing the overly used title of “homemade”, I added a personal message from the family, mentioning how long they had been in business and that the same tradition at their home could now be at yours. I then had the son I was working with, hand sign, “the Leal’s”, for the personal touch.

The label was an instant hit with the restaurant and the salsa was an instant local hit in the retail stores and has continued to grow and be added into more and more stores across the panhandle of Texas including local Wal-Marts. Outside of the label itself there has been no additional advertising to spur the products success, only excellent service maintaining the retail accounts and seeing that their customer’s shelves have been stocked.