Taylor James offer a one-stop production solution that blends CGI, photography, live-action and post-production to deliver your concepts to the highest quality, even with unforgiving budgets and timelines. Our studio in New York, headed by founder Glen Taylor, supports the mothership in London to help agencies across the US capitalize on our advanced production services. We have been a leader in efficient integrated production solutions for years, delivering multi-platform campaigns for brands such as Sony, Toyota and Amex. We help global agencies and brands execute award winning digital campaigns in this exciting new area of production.

If you think you can bring something to our team and are looking for a fresh challenge then get in touch. We’d love to see your work and hear about your experience. If you want to step into a creative and challenging work environment with good long term prospects, send us your CV and showreel! Click Here To Apply

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Computer generated imagery and photography are at a juxtaposition. While photographers clean up their images, making them look more like renderings, 3D artists are adding blemishes, dirt, scratches and developing tools like subsurface scattering to make their renderings look more like snapshots. Photographers are fighting to remove noise, CGI artists are adding it; photographers are using digital techniques like focus stacking to extend depth of field, while CGI artists begin with unlimited depth of field and artificially reduce it.

Spielberg recently mused that “audiences are so used to digital enhancements or replacements that they don’t trust cinema anymore. They see a movie and… if something beautiful strikes them emotionally, or in a beautiful way, they say ‘That was faked’ or ‘They did that later on the computer’.” He defended his latest epic film, War Horse, saying “we had three days of amazing sunsets, and we actually took advantage of those. There is no sky replacement.”

For our project for SIMPONI, a mixture of techniques were used, including filming objects in our studio for the 2:30m teaser and replicating these objects in CGI for cross-platform deliverables. This afforded the client and agency the control and flexibility they were after. With the full compliment of technical and creative skills, plus live-action and photography studio, in-house, TJ was able to seamlessly blend approaches for a cohesive integrated campaign where the technique is secondary.

What do you think, can you tell which elements are CGI and which are real? Share your comments on Facebook or Twitter

And if you want to see the flying man… CGI Experts on Flying Bird Man

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For more details on the event - click here!

Can you describe your passion for photography in one sentence?
It’s the most accessible of all the art forms and has the power to change lives.

What do you think Photography and creative imagery brings to our society?
Photography is used to record and create and has infiltrated almost every aspect of life in the western world. Without photography we wouldn’t have been able to make the advancements we have made in medicine and astronomy, for example. As a society, we are all becoming more visual; personally, I couldn’t image an article without at least one image to provide relevant context. Photography is empowering everyday people to be creative through affordable cameras and aspirational notions of identity and self-promotion. Most of the most moving pieces of journalism I come across are heavily image-led.

Where’s your favorites place to take your camera in London?
The Square Mile on a Saturday or Sunday morning, though now that I run a photography organisation full time I’d be lying if I said I took photos other than on holiday.

Do you believe in the expression ‘You don’t take a photograph, you make it.’?
There is a lot to be said for the subject, but just as much for the photographer. If we are talking about professional or skilled photography then absolutely, on the most basic level photographers influence the environment they are capturing, and craft a consistent tonal aesthetic appropriate to each project.

Who or what in the creative world most inspires you?
Edward Burtnsky, Arnhel de Serra and Evgenia Arbugaeva are three photographers that have my full attention at the moment.

You’re originally from South Africa, why have you chosen London and are you staying?
No society is perfect and both Cape Town and London have so much to offer. I am aiming to 50/50 in both cities within the next five years.

What did you want to be when you grew up?
In order from the age of 4:  A fireman, tennis player, rock star and entrepreneur .

What’s the first thing you do in the morning to get you started for the day ahead?
Breathe

What’s the one thing you could not live without?
My Vespa

What’s the toughest challenge you’ve had to overcome in business so far?
Survival; as a not-for-profit we are continually having to reinvent ourselves to stay alive.

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
Chance favours the prepared

Highlight of career so far?
Presenting our youth project to Ban Ki Moon (UN Secretary General) at the United Nations in NYC in 2010, followed closely by this year’s festival.

What are you most excited about at the London Festival of Photography?
The Great British Public exhibition at Dog Eared Gallery and The Gaddafi Archives (Libya Before the Arab Spring) at Slade Research Centre.

The 2012 London Festival of Photography theme explores the changing boundaries between the public and the private, as both physical and metaphorical concepts, and the social consequences of these shifts. Considering the role of photography as a tool for documentation, expression and collaboration, the festival will present work responding to the theme in its broadest interpretation.

The festival is produced by Shoot Experience, a not-for-profit organisation that aims to open people’s eyes to their surroundings through photography, and is committed to reinvesting all profits back into photography. For information on the exhibitions and 30 events surrounding the festival or to purchase tickets, visit www.lfph.org

Our industry is an ever changing beast and as a consequence it is essential to be at the forefront of technological development. It’s our responsibility to be able to provide our clients with a production path which is both effective and good value, so we are regularly testing new software on personal projects and through the challenges we face with commissioned work.

We recently created a photorealistic kangaroo for DDB and Emerson, which was notoriously challenging from a technical perspective. We had to utilise a new product called “hairfarm” which has made advances in shading algorithms and grooming tools to achieve the level of realism our client needed in the tight timescales allocated.

Despite rapid advances in rendering algorithms, fracturing dynamics and muscle systems, which simulate the movement of muscles under skin, there is no replacement for good old-fashioned observation. Observation and a fundamental artistic eye will always be 70% of the battle. At Taylor James, we place great emphasis on honing these creative skills with all of our artists and they are constantly going back to real-world references. The technology is a tool, and it can make us quicker, more efficient, and allow us to push the boundaries of accuracy. But unless you know what ‘physically accurate’ looks like, you will never achieve it, in spite of the technology.

Our industry stems from a traditional arts background and you can see more and more of these techniques being utilised in software today. The techniques never change, the software just gets faster. Digital sculpting programs such as Zbrush and Mudbox, or painting programs such as Mari and body paint are all based off of foundation principles of sculpting clay and painting images, which stem back thousands of years. We have used these tools in productions such as for Invega, which depicts a woman shedding her old skin. Skin elements were captured on the photographic shoot, using a specific lighting setup to produce clean textures for the CG artists.

Having said this, without a keen eye for detail these projects wouldn’t have been possible.

The VFX industry is always exciting, challenge breeds innovation and this often results in techniques which help us transcend the boundaries of manually recreating characters and objects in the computer. 3d scanning has brought a new way of obtaining 3D data and we have used this to our clients benefit on a recent whisky project. Often clients come to us for something they can’t achieve in reality, such as an elaborate camera move or a more perfect, controlled and pristine version of their products.

Check out the feature for the making of Pegasus in 3D World here, and CG Arena have broken down what we did and how we did it alongside the step by step images too - see here! Plus an insider interview!

We are also very proud to see that Dow got ‘Ad of the Day’ last week in AdWeek following the ‘Solutionism’ campaign ad’s. The main focus being the new environmentally friendly ‘quiet’ train alongside the various beautiful images we created for the global solutions company. Read the feature here!

See our projects here:
Pegasus and Dow

Thanks guys!

Note to Editors: If you are keen to find out more about any of our projects for any features or advertising, please contact Laura Frost at [email protected]

We were approached to create the stunning design of a powerful, fantastical horse to look as though it was made out of thousands of phones, for the huge launch of the new generation of smartphone by Huawei. Another piece of design imagery we are quite proud to be a part of, following the recent success of the beautiful CGI design work designed for the Sunday Times anniversary cover!

The symbolic winged horse is famed for representing speed and freedom which is why Huawei chose it as the central theme for the launch of the new phone ‘Ascend’, the “world’s fastest phone”. Each phone was built entirely in CGI (computer generated imagery), astonishing consumers and figures in advertising agencies all over the world as they observed the photo-realistic images at the Mobile World Congress last week.

So how did we do it?

The Huawei Ascend project came into us as a quick turn-around job and there wasn’t much time to nail the concept and visualise this stunning design. Luckily for us the client had a clear direction for the pose and camera position of the Pegasus, so we were able to match it quite quickly and get on with designing the intricate process of placing phones across the body and wings of the Pegasus.

We had to model the phone from a physical model as we had no CAD data, so we scanned it for accuracy then expertly modelled it to make it smooth, accurate and optimised enough that rendering 2000+ of them wouldn’t be an issue. We modelled details including the camera inners with lens and USB port as these are the small details which if modelled help pick up subtle lighting differences and detail that doing by texture wouldn’t give.
We’ve done a lot of jobs where something large is made up of many small items, so we have procedures and processes designed to help speed this up.

Dave Wortley, Lead Technical CGI Artist at Taylor James, says “The placement was extremely important, to help emphasize the shape and form of the body, and design a complex wing structure which felt light yet solid. A combination of in-house tools as well as manual placing and adjustment was used to ensure there were no phones overlapping or interpenetrating which turned into quite a bit of a jigsaw puzzle!”

Once the Phone had been modelled and positions specified, we swapped out the proxy low-res phone models, switched to our high resolution 20,000 poly version, which with over 2000 phones making up the structure of the Pegasus, meant we had over 40 million polygons in the scene, which as we were rendering at a large 8k resolution, meant we could see lots of detail close-up.

The next challenge was lighting, trying to get a smooth rim-lit look with such a facetted shape we encountered issues straight away with the falloff from lights not being smooth across the model because of the angular nature of the geometry. We created a complex light rig involving curved lights to light small parts of the Pegasus with different lights and then at the rendering stage we rendered multiple versions of lighting setups which allowed our Retouchers to paint in extra lighting and reflection where they felt it was necessary to get a nice result.

Why CGI?

Its projects like this which would be almost impossible without CGI, the lighting was so complex that there is no way it could have been done in a studio with Photography. Taylor James ensure they invest time heavily at the start of projects like this, modelling accurately and preparing it for good detail levels so we can re-use the original phone asset and render an individual phone at high resolution for further product shots.

This is highly valuable as advertising campaigns are more and more integrated across digital, print and motion platforms. See the project page for more images!

“Access-Success-Growth” is the phrase at the heart of FedEx’s brand and these concepts are reflected in each image, associated with strap-lines “Connect to over 90% of the world’s GDP within two days” and “How do you deliver 8.5 million shipments a day? Teamwork.” The overarching concept set by BBDO was developed in line with the CGI and retouch expertise and precision in our studio. Ed Taylor, Taylor James Creative Director, said “CGI offers unlimited creative possibilities, there is no inherent style born out of the discipline. The most important thing is creating an aesthetic that most effectively solves our client’s brief.”

We went through an extensive concepting phase for this campaign, to create a strong graphic and striking identity of the brand’s key messages utilising computer generated imaging techniques. The four final artworks are beautifully detailed and sleek, aptly depicting the key messages of ‘connectivity’ and ‘teamwork’.
“This new advertising campaign extends the strong legacy of the FedEx brand globally by reinforcing our commitment to delivering an outstanding customer experience consistently around the world.” said Rajesh Subramaniam, senior vice president of International Marketing, FedEx Services.

The print adverts are currently live in countries such as Brazil, India, Canada, China, Japan, Germany, Korea, Mexico, Singapore, Taiwan and the UK. Each advert points you to the microsite: http://connect.fedex.com/gb/en/ which takes you behind the scenes and demonstrates ways FedEx helps customers’ access opportunities in the marketplace, locally and around the globe.

See the images on Bestadsontv.com here!

Check out our Project Pages for more images and info on the project..

The anniversary issue of the magazine was in the paper and online on Sunday 5 February (who bought it??) and featured breathtaking imagery including the 50 greatest front covers over the 50 years. The image is currently being exhibited at the Saatchi Gallery, London, at an exhibition showcasing the best covers and photography included in the magazine over the past half a century. The image in question features a 3D simple yet eye-catching ’50′ incorporating 100+ front covers published since its launch in 1962. (See our Twitter and Facebook for inside pics of our very own designer Dave Wortley at the launch event at the gallery!)

After concepting several designs within a CGI environment, the final image chosen by the Art Director at Sunday Times, Alyson Waller, is a bold and modern looking design exhibiting every one of the front covers hanging from subtle strings to form a 3D number 50, in a glossy gallery-style environment. Dave Wortley, Lead 3D Technical Artist, explains “the challenge with this project was to create a sense of scale and power. We wanted to make sure it would look like an installation in a large gallery and not a scaled model. Each magazine is unique in shape and form and there are over 100 covers from 50 years of the Sunday Times Magazine running, so we used a bit of scripting to avoid repeats on the front row and make the rest appear random.

“It was a challenge to complete this project in the timeframe, with the attention given at the early concepting stage. We created a model of the magazine made to scale and each magazine is threaded onto a wire. If you look closely enough you can even see the staples in the fold of the magazine.”

The celebratory exhibition, opened 31 January until 18 February at The Saatchi Gallery, showcases work of contributors to the magazine, including some of the world’s finest photographers. Photographers featured include Dan McCullin, David Bailey, Eve Arnold, Snowdon, Richard Avedon, Eugene Richards, Sam Taylor-Wood, Terry O’Neill, Chris Floyd and Stuart Franklin.

Have a look at the piece in Creative Review and on BestAdsOnTV.com!

And don’t forget to check out our project pages for more images and watch this space for behind the scenes designs from the concepting & creative development stage…

This thriving cluster of businesses is what led Matt Biddulph to coin the term ‘Silicon Roundabout’ as he believed it had the potential of mirroring the Silicon Valley from over the pond. Biddulph created a Google map snapshot of companies in the area and watched it grow from 15 start-ups to now encompass 600 digital companies.

Seeing this clear visual representation amidst the hubbub, Matt Webb, MD of Shoreditch-based design consultancy BERG, wanted to draw on the growth and strive to bring more people into the area. Webb wanted to “create a virtuous cycle of start-ups, talent, money and kick-start more events” and so sprouted the Tech City map which Taylor James is proud to be a part of, connecting all the businesses in the area to form the powerful network displayed to the left.

Shoreditch is fast becoming the major hub for media agencies, creative production studios and tech firms with a digital edge – and Taylor James Creative Production studio if situated right in the heart of it on Curtain road. Taylor James has its roots firmly grounded in Shoreditch having been here over 12 years, and is one of the long-standing companies in the area. We are proud to be surrounded by a wealth of innovative creative and technological companies, it is a collaborative community and everyone appears eager to form creative partnerships still maintaining the boutique and niche ethos of many of the establishments. This is one thing Shoreditch is known for; its uniqueness and dynamism.

The welcoming support of the government to accelerate the growth of the Tech City for the Olympics in July 2012 will surely attract more business to the area between Shoreditch and Stratford; big companies as well as small start-ups. “The bigger the network, the bigger collision of ideas can occur,” said Carlos Espinal, manager and partner of Seedcamp. Shoreditch is a fertile mixing ground and as Richard Heap comments; “Where Tech City comes in is helping to attract more attention and bring the eyes of the world onto the area. I think it will help, and the two elements will work well side-by-side.”  Careful not to confuse the creative innovation of Shoreditch with the push for global technological corporations, Heap states “Shoreditch and Tech City Stratford will not become one. They will spark off each other’s strengths. Tech City is about big organisations, and some people would say that is totally unlike Shoreditch, which is about small companies, start-ups sparking conversations in cafes and bars. There’s dynamism about Shoreditch that is unique.”

And it’s that creativity Taylor James loves and thrives from! We always knew there was something stirring in East London……

Replacing our old menu system is our latest and greatest feature so far ~ our new filter box! You can now see all our categories in one quick, easy glance. This should make it much easier to immediately hide everything irrelevant and keep browsing focused and simple. We’ve also added a couple of brand new options…

The first is a keyword search, based on job title, agency and client. This is a really quick way of finding a job you’ve seen before or to check any work by a particular agency. Try typing in ‘Nissan’!

The next option came about through our MD’s penchant for organising jobs by colour. “Why not let the user do this?” we thought, so we did. Now you can choose a colour from the filter box and voilà! You are presented with a glorious page of blue jobs, perfect for creating mood-boards.

If you have any other comments or suggestions that would make our site easier to use, please contact us on [email protected]

The job was to consist of two distinct parts; we were to create a print only image as well as a 360 panoramic studio. The design of the studio was carefully constructed using a combination of old archival drawings, existing periodical buildings, descriptions in literature, as well as a little creative imagination. We also had a historian on hand to approve all elements before they were constructed ensuring that the final rendering was as close as possible to how it could have been.

Once we had the studio constructed the task was to export a seamless 360 degree panorama to form part of an iphone app which would allow users to take a virtual tour of the location. We also generated some 3d models of sculptures and other elements in the studio which the user can select and move around to explore and learn more about.

The exhibition itself is a sight to behold, bringing together over half of Da Vinci’s surviving paintings. As well as two questionable offerings thought to be produced by him, but still under analysis from critics and scholars, the first is Virgin and Child the second Christ. Luke Syson, Curator of the National Gallery explains just how difficult the exhibition has been to pull together:

“We’ve had to do two things. One is to persuade people of the scholarly merits of this show – were it just about the name, were it just about creating a blockbuster experience, I don’t think we would have been as successful as we (hopefully) have been. People don’t lend pictures by Leonardo lightly, and as there are so few of them they are incredibly important for each institution that owns them, as emblems of the particular galleries that contain them. Discussions have taken years – quite literally – in some cases.”

The exhibition is on until the 5th of Feburary 2012, and the interactive app is available on iPhone or Andoid and you can see the entire project here.

Chosen for Lürzer’s prestigious ‘Ad of the week’  award, our Pretty Polly campaign has been making waves all over the country. From animated displays to nationwide billboards. See it in pride of place on Lürzer’s website or find out more information about the job right here!

The concept has been developed by agency Beattie McGuinness Bungay, to promote designs by fashion label, House of Holland, for its latest range of tights. The campaign is being widely featured in fashion and lifestyle publications and online, including Grazia, Glamour, Heat, Sugar, Harpers, Nylon, MTV, Daily Mail, as well as outdoor billboards and digital OOH displays nationwide. The campaign is running for 6 months.

Our team of artists integrated the photography of fashion photographer, Jolly, with Computer Generated Imagery to create 3 stylised executions with versions for moving image and print. It is this ability to seamlessly transform still images into motion that makes the studio stand out as a complete creative production house, able to control an integrated production under one roof. worked closely with Jolly on set at the photography shoot, to ensure the necessary shots were captured to be integrated with the CGI environment. The attention to detail and involvement of the studio even at this first stage in the production was essential in ensuring the combination into 3D and motion was successful. Head of Retouch, Josh Rogers, says “Knowing the print ads were to be adapted for animation meant ensuring we had sufficient parallax to accommodate the camera moves. Our key consideration when building the city background was ensuring we had enough ‘reveal’ on our sky and building elements, so that as the camera moved down the street all the buildings had subtle realistic parallax within our comic book world.”

This campaign is another strong example of the use of limited assets to produce a holistic campaign across still and moving image. With rapid developments in advertising technology, such as the use of digital billboards and the rising number of digital magazines for portable devices, this elegant and cost-effective solution is at the height of demand. Our expertise and ability to work flexibly with diverse techniques across print and motion enabled this campaign to come to life.

We’re really honored to accept this award, we’d like to thank Aitken Jolly (photographer), Beattie McGuinness Bungay (agency), our families, friends, our dog, God, the universe, everyone who believed in us.

Our Founder, Glen Taylor, is in NYC now working with existing & new clients to bring a bit of British style to the American advertising industry!

Glen will be available to personally work with the local advertising agencies and partners. He said: “The US is such an important market for us and New York is the perfect entry point to base the initial office. Ideally we would have made the move sooner but we’ve been working hard to build a production studio that’s ahead of the industry curve. Our recent success is based on our ability to package solutions that combine all services, delivering the highest quality of work in-house.  Across print, digital and broadcast, creative inspiration and innovation is always at the heart of everything we do; being based in New York will drive a lot of positive change for us, working even closer with our clients in the US.”

Glen Taylor continues “I want people to know how passionate and committed to each and every job we are, in a constantly evolving industry it’s often difficult for production studios to marry creativity with technical proficiency. Taylor James is here to show that those things aren’t mutually exclusive; whatever the brief, we’ll deliver the solution that ticks all the boxes”.

Keep up-to-date with the move by following us on Twitter & Facebook.

In an article on 22^nd August 2011, Russell Adams at The Wall Street Journal reports,

“Among the hardest hit in the most recent quarter was the Washington Post Company’s flagship newspaper, where print advertising declined 12% to $66.6 million for the quarter.”

Though not an entirely global trend, Western print advertising’s recent stagnation is often seen as an indication of its eventual demise. This is assumptive and largely inaccurate. Though the power and growth of digital and online advertising is indisputable, print advertising is far from powerless.

As the oldest form of advertising, print certainly has a well-established credibility, as well as a global reach and loyal following. It also has a versatility that other forms of advertising do not have; print can be displayed in magazines, on billboards, at bus stops, in newspapers, at train stations, and many more locations that do not depend upon a digital device or Internet access.

Perhaps one of its strongest features is its simplicity; users are less assaulted without sounds and movement, allowing message to be more subtly communicated. Print ads have the ability to integrate into their surroundings and feel at home in a way that motion and interactive adverts do not. Take for instance a magazine; no one thinks twice of the watch ads and hand cream samples when flicking through GQ. They are as much a part of the mag as the articles. Now compare that to adverts appearing in the middle of a TV show, the notable increase in volume, the loud, desperate attempts to re-gain the attention of the viewer. Advertising in print is a much more delicate art.

Trusting the potential of a print advert’s visual impact is key. In our print campaign, ‘Fashion Lives’, commissioned by CHI & Partners, London for Westfield shopping centre, the striking impact of the final print image was in the simplicity of its message. The project’s combination of photography (by David Hughes) and CGI, like much of our work, emphasises print’s more artistic nature as an advertising form. Yet it also demonstrates that print can be as innovative and cutting edge as motion and interactive advertising; the difference is that in our print, the innovation is more subtle and understated.

In 2010, the executives of Condé Nast, Wenmer Media, Meredith National Media, Time Inc. and Hearst collaborated to launch an advertising campaign entitled, ‘The Power of Print’. In one particular advert, a photo of the swimmer Michael Phelps accompanies the statement: “We surf the Internet. We swim in magazines.”

Charles Townsend, the CEO of Condé Nast, stated, “There’s a reason magazines are such an enduring and engaging media force. The format showcases our rich content and our advertisers’ brand messages like no other medium, resulting in a bond with consumers that is uniquely powerful.” Vogue, perhaps the most famous Condé Nast publication, is arguably founded upon the luxurious tangibility and artistry of the magazine’s content. The advertising in such magazines is almost a separate artistic industry in itself, and this is largely thanks to print advertising’s artistic production style and form.

Furthermore, despite magazines and newspapers creating online and digital versions of themselves, the appeal of a physical publication is evident in the loyalty of its readers as well as this, taken from the Simmons Multi-Media Engagement Study:

“Magazines are the No. 1 medium of engagement – across all dimensions measured. Magazines continue to score significantly higher than TV or the Internet in ad receptivity and all of the other engagement dimensions, including ‘trustworthy’ and ‘inspirational.’” (more)

Away from the West, there has been a growth of print advertising in Developing countries. In an article published online on 22^nd August 2011, the Nepalese advertising industry emphasises its own growth:

“Turnover from print media increased massively in the past fiscal year mainly due to lengthy power cuts and inclusion of advertisements published different magazines under print segment,” said Raj Kumar Bhattarai, president of AAN (Advertising Agency of Nepal).”

Similarly, an article in The Economic Times states that India’s print advertising has witnessed a growth of 16% in the first six months of 2011 (according to media market research firm Adex India). The total annual advertising sector in India is also stated to be worth $5bn, and print advertising is the leading contributor at 44%.

The latest figures released by the Financial Times on Oct 5^th 2011, show that print advertising has fallen by only 5% in the last year, still giving it a 16.7% market share with spending around £1.37bn. Whilst this is still a way from the £2.26bn spending online it is still very sizable portion of the market, much to big to ignore.

At Taylor James, our ability to combine photography, CGI and retouch means that our print advertising work is often thematically and aesthetically compatible with digital and multimedia forms of advertising. This brings us to a primary point; despite the advances in technology and new media, advertising is in danger of becoming overly concerned with only the newest and latest breakthrough in the industry’s technological capabilities. Print advertising, rather than being cast out and forgotten, should be integrated with newer, more interactive forms to create a cohesive and well-rounded campaign.

Commissioned by Glue Isobar, London, Taylor James’ 2008 project for the Toyota iQ is perhaps the best demonstration of this. From underground and train station digital displays to the IMAX cinema wraparound billboard, to TV; the Toyota iQ campaign encompassed all advertising mediums, in print, digital and broadcast. Despite the highly digital aesthetic of the project, we knew that we could not discard the power of print, since it would simply be a direct and still representation of the campaign as a whole. Similarly in our 2009 project for Citrix Systems, commissioned by Y&R, San Francisco, we created twelve separate deliverables: six for print and six for animation. It was in combining these two separate forms of advertising, print and motion, that perhaps gave us, and importantly the client, such good results.

Multi-platform advertising is more important than any one form, whether online, on television, in smartphone App technology, or even print. It is a combination of these forms, and in their ability to combine with each other coherently, delivering a simple and effective message, that will ultimately deliver the best results for the client, and ensure that the clearest and most versatile advertising work is produced.

Yet one particular aspect of Apple’s modern 21st century image was largely shaped by its advertising and intertwined with its product design: simplicity.

Of course, having a strong product is vital to the success of any advertising campaign. But the importance (and ubiquity amongst successful brands) of simplicity and clarity in their advertising is evident: Nike, Virgin, Amazon, and eBay are four companies whose international status is, at least in part, due to the success and simplicity of their previous advertising campaigns. Both the iPad and Amazon Kindle campaigns are current examples of simplistic advertising. They simply display the product and demonstrate what it does.

However, the emergence of CGI and digital software to manipulate and create images and motion in contemporary advertising should be viewed in tandem with this simple style of advertising. At Taylor James, our motion work regularly demonstrates our belief in simple advertising, paired with our expertise in using CGI and retouch to achieve a stunning visual impact. Working with Y&R, San Francisco in our advertising campaign for Citrix Systems, we were asked to further promote the company’s computer virtualization services. Though we used both live action photography and CGI, the result is a crisp and clear motion result, which demonstrates the product simply, but with the visual impact that we are renowned for.

Starbucks are another internationally recognised brand opting for a simple advertising campaign for their ‘however-you-want-it’ Frappucino drinks range. Yet because the advert is dependant on the juxtaposition between sounds and visuals, the advert is only screened in cinemas, where the volume and impact of the combination is at its most powerful. The advert also has a consistent white background, and is simply a demonstration of the wide variety of customers who buy Starbucks Frappucinos – it is simple, crisp, clear and visually (and audibly) impacting.

Yet as well as motion advertising, the importance of simplicity in print advertising can never be underestimated. Brands have long championed print adverts that are founded on simplicity and good design; the classic Guinness adverts such as ‘My Goodness, My Guinness’ and ‘Lovely Day For A Guinness’ are now of iconic status. Today’s print advertising is increasingly dependant on the digital manipulation of images to achieve the maximum impact possible whilst still maintaining clarity; examples of this are now commonplace at bus stops and on billboards.

Working with Mullen, North Carolina, we produced our Nature Train project for CSX, the freight rail company to promote their fuel efficiency. Our retouch team worked on transforming the train from steel and iron into riverbanks and trees, and yet whilst the work and skills required for the project were far from simple, the final message is.

Simplicity in advertising is at the very heart of the industry’s concept: to promote a brand, service or product as clearly and efficiently as possible to generate or maintain consumer interest. In an age where people want their information faster, and have less time to decode adverts, a foundation of simplicity and clarity has never been more important.

The feature image for this blog is “Campbell’s Soup”