SOL LEWITT 11 TIMES SQUARE
Art direction, motion designMicrosoft’s mission statement is to empower everyone on the planet to achieve more—and so they make a point to highlight their cultural partnerships and successs stories via their In Culture content. A large chunk of the workload at my job is conforming this content—whether it’s photography, video, or other media—to play on the large outdoor displays at the Microsoft store at 11 Times Square, NY.
NYC curator and LeWitt specialist Lindsay Aveilhé used Microsoft AI to power an app, which allows users to get a exploratory experience of LeWitt’s work and legacy (story here). Our source media was a number of images of the artist, his work, and his sketches from the digital exhibit.
NYC curator and LeWitt specialist Lindsay Aveilhé used Microsoft AI to power an app, which allows users to get a exploratory experience of LeWitt’s work and legacy (story here). Our source media was a number of images of the artist, his work, and his sketches from the digital exhibit.
TIMELINE: 2 weeks
TOOLS: After Effects, Photoshop, Illustrator
Typically my team is either given rough storyboards from our client (the Microsoft brand team) or we create boards ourselves and move into animation. For this project, there was no clear direction given —so I was tasked to bring this collection of images to life on the 11 Times Sq. displays from concept to execution.
I drew inspiration from the work itself, and created a variety of geometric graphic transitions emulating the systematized compositions of LeWitt. The typewriter-style text transitions echo the sketchbook/process-oriented focus of the exhibit, and the color blocking was all given a hand-touched painterly texture to appear like the art.
The goal of this work is to drive people to visit the Microsoft In Culture content online and increase positive awareness of the brand at work in the world. With no precise way to grab a metric of how many passersby saw the piece and then visited the site, the work simply had to be as eye-catching, clear, and delightful as it could be.
When the result was delivered, one of the primary stakeholders was so excited by the creative on the piece she said she’d risk an NYC snowstorm and Covid (this was January 2020) to take the subway to get some photos of it from the street. Maybe not the most scientific metric of success—but still encouraging support for this solution!
