2010 Audi S4 - Story Board & Print Ad Series - Mika & Mo

The idea for the ad and storyboard we decided to use is preparation, patience for what you want, and the payoff when you finally get it. We're pretty happy with the way everything looks (which says a lot - especially for me). Taking the photos was a pain in the ass at times because trying to match reality with what i've decided i want in my head is always a tough endeavor, you have to compromise and improvise.

Ad series sketches

These are the sketches for the ad series we want to create. Seems like it's going to be very difficult and photoshop intensive since the car doesn't exist, and it's hard to come up on $2500 racing uniforms...yay.

Ad sketches - Mika & Mo

Scanner problems are awesome.
Anyway, here are our sketches, we decided to each do 10 sketches and tried to make them self explanatory in the ads themselves. Feel free to ask any questions and leave comments! :)



Audi has always been about technology and being the first to implement it, with these ads, especially the second set, we tried to show that among other things.
The new S4 is the "greenest" of its competitors thanks to Audi's race proven FSI technology that has won them 6 Le Manns championships in a row. Audi has gone from a V8 back to forced induction with their new V6T which is supercharged and achieves 28mpg highway.
The new S4 has a new sport differential coupled with its legendary quattro all wheel drive system which is now rear-wheel biased for a sportier drive and feel.
The quattro all wheel drive system is all weather capable, and incredibly fun to utilize on twisty roads.
They offer VW/Audi's Direct Shift gear-box which operates with dual clutches for incredible shifting speeds (not advertised) along with a standard manual transmission.

We also wanted to show that although the new S4 is race bred, that it is still incredibly elegant and understated.

Here are some more facts about Audi that a lot of people aren't aware of:

*Audi = Latin translation of the founder's name, Horch.

* 1934, first use of a mid-mounted engine with the help
of Dr. Ferdinand Porsche

* 1937, first use of aluminum

* 1993, first use of Aluminum Space Frame design in production

* 1980, first use of Quattro, our revolutionary all-wheel drive system

* 5,000,000 kilometers of testing before production

* 9,621 patents, most ever by an auto company

* 62 wins in 79 Le Mans Races, First ever by a diesel 06/18/2006, First using Bio-Diesel 2008

* 2/3rd's of Audi concepts become a relaity

* Audi sales versus Lexus 906,000 to 430,000 worldwide

* 2000, Introduction of FSI thorugh racing. Our revolutionary sequential fuel injection system.

* Winner of 14 International Touring Car Championships

* Never produced a car with any less than a Five Star side-impact rating

* There are 36,520 stitches in the leather interior of our A8L models

* Cold weather accoustic testing onour cars is done -40 degrees.

Brand Research

History

Audi Ag, Known as Audi is a German automobile manufacturer that was founded in 1910s by Augus Hoch (his original name was Audiwerke Gmbh) Audi has been almost wholly owned by Volkswagen group since 1964. The tagline Is advancement through Technology. North American tagline is Innovation through technology. As of 2006 the tagline is Truth in Engineering.
In 1932, Audi merged with Horch, DKW, and Wwandere to form Auto Union. The Audi emblem is four overlapping rings that represent the four marguqes of Auto union. It symbolizes the amalgamation of Audi with DKW. The first ring represents Audi, The second represents DKW, the third is Horch, and the fourth is Wandrere.

The build up and onset of WWII encouraged the development and production of special vehicles for military purposes in the 1930s. The Auto Union became an important supplier of vehicles to Germany’s armed forces.
Modern Era of Audi: Volkswagen introduced the Audi brand to the U.S. for the 1970 model year. The first new car of this regime was the Audi 100. The Audi image at this time was conservative one
Currently Audi sales are growing strongly in Europe. Recently Audi has started offering a computerized control system for its cars called Multi Media Interface (MMI)

Audience:

target audience is very wide: family college students, company executives. However, our primary Audience will be executives. Business people who need to show off their cars to their surroundings.

Competitors are the Mercedes Benz and BMW.

Strategy: To attract primary Audience, we will tell people to replace Mercedes Benz/ BMW to take their luxuriousness to next step. Kind of like the latest Audi commercial: Replacing old house/Benz to new house and Audi. lol

Reference Board: Audi has rally heritage so we will incorporate that into their luxury look. EX: dirt road that leads into the city.

Information by Mika & Mo

eBay final redesign

I redesigned eBay to make it more user friendly and less complicated/busy in design and interface, but at the same time made it more appealing visually. I personally really like the direction I took this and that's not easy for me to say because normally I hate almost everything I come up with, it takes others to convince me to like it :P
Basically everything eBay does will be made to happen on one page with windows that pop up and expand, the windows can be minimized or closed, active scroll bars appear when necessary, at any time you can bring the background up by clicking it. Certain things such as the login button are color oriented and functions like a traffic light - it's red to catch your attention, stop you and let you know you should login, then it turns yellow once you click it, and finally you click the green login button and the whole thing disappears and is replaced by a notification that you are logged in. I looked for other weaknesses in eBay's page designs and I don't feel eBay really needs other pages redesigned, the page you view items is setup pretty well, there is a wealth of info but it's all necessary, so are the "watching" and "feedback" pages, they're all pretty intuitive and simple in design now since the redesign they did a year ago or so. I feel everything else could be implemented into this new design almost flawlessly.
To eBay: this is copyrighted. I'll sue you.
Please steal my idea, thanks.

eBay redesign

I decided to redesign eBay because quite frankly, it's a mess. I wanted to simplify their main page and make it easier to get to where you want to be without having to constantly change pages to get somewhere e.g. logging in. I have a few other ideas as well and an HTML based front page. The yellow buttons will expand giving you their functions in a windowed format, you can roll over a button to expand it via a window and keep it open until you move your cursor away from it, or you can click the button and the window will stay open until you click another button or option. At the bottom of the page is a scrolling item list that can also be manually scrolled through to see your watched items, or auctions that are about to end. This is not final, still working out some ideas, so bear with me!

Web Design: The Good and the Bad

THE GOOD

www.chipotle.com is definitely one of my favorites and a great example of good web design. It has a great flash based interface that makes sense, is very intuitive, and very easy to navigate.
Great sound effects, great animations, they pull the whole thing off like selling their 1300 calorie burritos.

www.pentaximaging.com is a pretty good website too. They've laid it out as simply as possible making it easy to navigate to the information you want. Simple flash menus that guide you to where you want to be, and you don't feel like your brain has just been overloaded by too much information at once. The colors are easy on the eyes, and you know you're on a website for a camera company immediately.

THE BAD

www.wizz.to/australia/brisbane is one of my recent least favorites. When you first goto www.wizz.to you are given the idea that the following pages will be as simple to navigate and easy on the brain, but when I was researching my design for Australia I navigated into this haven of fraudulent simplicity.
The guise of the website is that it's laid out fairly simply and is easy to navigate, but in reality it's a bombardment of information and links with no real grid or design. There is just too much going on for one page. Your eyes fly around the screen trying to find some place to start looking for the info you want. Drives me nuts.

Ladies and gentlemen, I now present to you the worst website...ever.
http://www.frnz.de/
It's a German "website" that's all types of horrible, and if you don't speak German, don't worry about it, because I'm pretty sure people who do won't know what the hell is going on either. All I can assume is the dog pictured created the website (but I highly doubt it would be this bad if it did).
I don't really need to say anything else except have a paper bag handy.

Final Poster ideas

The idea was to keep with the theme of the logos and incorporate the same type of imagery presented in them. I feel as if though something is still missing. I have no idea why the enviro posters look like crap...

This is an idea for the poster. It's kind of hard to make my logo work since it's an image in itself.
I'm going to use this look for the other cities as well.
What do you guys think?

Experience the Wonder Down Under

Final logos for Australia with the tag line: Experience the Wonder Down Under

C&C Welcomed!

Aussie logos

I am liking the way these are looking, might have to do some color tweaks but otherwise i like the direction i'm going. I still need to finish australia's logo, i'm thinking a combination of all of the landmarks and animals in one logo.

sketchy

I designed a few variations for the country of Australia. My personal favorite is the middle one, these are obviously preliminary but I am hoping to expand off of these. The reason I like the middle one the most is because I feel it encompasses different aspects of Australia: the sun, the Sydney Opera House which is probably Australia's most well known landmark, and the British/Australian flag as a star on the tittle on the "I".





As far as the sketches to the right go,
I wanted to incorporate different elements from Australian culture, from the Kangaroo Paw plant that is being used as the tittle in the second "Australia" logo, to the Opera house, to the stars that are present on the Aussie flag, to national animals like the kouala, to the black swan, and also added other well known landmarks. For Melbourne I added the Art Spire, and used it as the "L" in one of the designs.
For Brisbane I used the cities flag stars and symbols, and implemented the Aussie flag as well.
These once again are preliminary sketches obviously and need to be worked on!

Aussieland

The land of hot Aussie's aka Australia is the country I am choosing because the land is beautiful, the people are hospitable and friendly, and the surf is killer.
The cities I'm choosing are Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane.

Wasted

My mind was a bloody mess, nothing accomplished, death of all possible creativity was achieved. Going to strive to resurrect it.
What a horrible week.

Inspiration

What inspires me to design is the world around me- the people, the architecture, the natural and intelligent designs, and the ability to communicate ideas in an aesthetically interesting and hopefully clever/original way.

Enterlude

My name is Mo Satarzadeh, I'm professional photographer majoring in Graphic Design. I love designing, I started drawing when I was 3 and went on pretty strong up until High School when I started to fall out of it because I became heavily occupied with skateboarding which became my creative outlet. Since I couldn't always skate, I needed another outlet for all of the thoughts in my head, and that is when I was introduced to Photoshop (5.0 at the time), at this point I started drawing, scanning and painting my pictures with Photoshop. Unfortunately (again), I didn't stick with it, and soon became occupied with other things. Now, about 8 years later I am very serious about designing and want to expand and push my mind/creativity through graphic design.
I enjoy designing logos and don't mind working for companies, but I mostly like creating things for my own satisfaction since I consider myself somewhat of an artist (I've never been one to take orders). My main thing is manipulating and incorporating my photo's into my designs. I've been doing that for a few years now, still have a long way to go until I am satisfied with my skill level (at which point I'm sure I won't be satisfied), can't wait to see what this class brings out of me.