Advertising excellence award

Last year, I created an illustration and did the ad layout for one of my primary client's major clients (don't ask). I started by building simple geometry in Cinema 4D since the shapes were quite complex. The rendered image was brought into Photoshop for painting and texturing, then I did the final typography and design in Illustrator to create the press-ready PDF that was sent to the magazine.

Recently, I was notified that this ad won an Advertising Excellence Award in a survey conducted by the Baxter Research Center for Progressive Railroading Magazine's September 2009 issue. Not exactly life changing stuff, but it's something. Apparently, it placed third for most read ad, even though it was on page 69 of an 80-page publication. The higher placing ads were no further back than page 32 of the magazine, so where your ad happens to be plays a major part in recognition by readers.

This illustration is not one of my personal favorites, but it has some good stuff in it and I went about things a bit differently, so I should be able to pull some helpful tutorials out of it. The final ad actually has five different images in it: four smaller inset images over the background, but I'll just be concentrating on the main image. Most of the insets were actually done much earlier and then reused for this ad. If I can get away with it, I do this as much as possible if I need to save time. These images are time- and money-consuming to create in the first place, so the cost can be amortized out over several projects if the images can be reused.