Portfolio Archive: MEC Poster Campaign

Published: August 26, 2017

The best part of working in the creative industry is having so many fun designs to share with others upon completion. While I collect my projects from my previous job and prepare them to go up on my portfolio (which may take a while), I’m going to continue Archiving some of my past school ones.

This one here was from one of my favourite classes in my program (Advertising) and is still one of my favourite projects. Even though it’s very simple, I liked that we had detailed specs to follow and had to try and come up with a solution that is unique enough to not be repeated by another student. The design had to be for the company Mountain Equipment Co-op which is a retail store for outdoor recreation. We had to come up with a 3-poster series, all image-based (with no text besides the logo), and we were each given a different department that the store sells (mine was Climbing).

Specifications:
3-Poster Series for MEC
Relating to one of their departments (In this case: Climbing)
Image-only

The photograph showcases the products that you can purchase in-store. The black illustrations surrounding are meant to exaggerate the strength and benefit of the items. For example: the hiking shoes are needed to have good grip and stick to the terrain as much as possible. A magnet symbolizes a pulling force just like that of gravity which keeps your feet on the ground. For the remaining posters, I kept with the same theme.

I came up with the idea for this campaign early on but went through different drafts of the final design. I at first had the product as a silhouette with a photograph texture overlaying it (something heavy duty — for example: the helmet had a texture of stone), then I had the same idea and imagery as now but all made in Illustrator, and finally I landed on the idea of having a clear photograph of the product with the Illustration only as an overlap. In the end, the mixed media helped create a balance and having an Illustration for the strength makes it feel more metaphorical than literal.