RAND Engineering & Architecture DPC has a yearly holiday email that they send out to clients and others. It usually features "Randy The Snowman" in a series of animated gifs.
This year RAND decided to raise awareness and help out of one of the charities they work with by using their holiday email to push a toy drive for New Alternatives for Children.
I was tasked to design and create a series of visual for the animated GIF. I worked closely with the RAND Marketing Director to come up with the messaging and the strategy.
In regards to the strategy, The email was sent out via Constant Contact and included links to an Amazon wishlist for perspective donors to buy from. As a fallback, there was also a link to page at RAND's website which also promoted the Toy Drive.
I always look forward to getting these assignments from my client. They're fun and allow me to stretch my illustrator muscles. Best of all this year was that I got to take part in helping to bring some joy into the lives of needy children and their families.
TECHNICAL SIDE NOTE
One of the challenges of producing these animated gifs each year is the opposite of what I normally face with retouching jobs: file size. In order to maintain within Constant Contact guidelines for image file sizes, I have to plan very carefully how to keep this animated gif below 400K in size and still maintain a decent amount of quality. Always tricky, but not impossible.