ADVERTISING (Print, Design, Social & Marketing)
It feels appropriate to call this my “traditional work.” Most of this is old and nothing like my current projects. But it shows experience. I’ve worked as a designer, art director, and creative director for many ad agencies, entertainment companies and brands, big and small. There is a whole lot more to see in every industry, category and media. Please look around the site to see more.
I used to sell insurance. Sort of, I worked on the advertising for Liberty Mutual at Kirshenbaum & Bond. Despite being a stiff sector, our client took some risks. We used a lot of ad-copy back then so I think these are more interesting these days if you just see the images. The basic concept: Liberty Mutual reeeeeally cares a lot about safety and tries to help avoid the strangest of accidents.
Sure, WW2 WPA poster imitations have been done a million times now. But no one had done it back when I did it. This was featured in Print magazine.
“Hey Aaron, why does Robot Repair’s logo look like the logo for Rockstar Energy drink?” Well, this will date me, but I made our logo before they even existed. So I ask, “why does rockstar energy drink use my logo?” It was supposed to look like a space invader and represented us launching simultaneously on both coasts.
Album covers for Robot Repair’s film trailer music. Intended to look more like an indie record label than a collection of “stock music playlists.” Rather than follow the design trends of competitors who universally tend to invent phony movie posters for album art, we wanted the albums to feel like record covers—hinting at the emotions on the album without giving away too much. (Click here to listen to them)
In early 2016, VR was exploding. Robot Repair quickly expanded capabilities to work comfortably in VR and we created this promo to show it. VR wasn’t what we had hoped at the time, but it lead to many tech explorations which are relevant now.
A portfolio, or “reel” is a collection of work made in the past, it’s not the work we will create tomorrow. So we decided to let go of the idea that we are “only as good as our last job” and made The Power of Music. It is a collection of some previous work mixed with other clips showing other new music put against picture — not just what went final.
Robot Repair wrote music in nearly every genre imaginable but we discovered some clients had certain misconceptions about our capabilities. When a client asked "Do you guys play guitars?" I realized we need to demonstrate we don’t just make electronic music with synths and drum machines. So we filmed EVERY instrument we own. The format of the video is odd and as one Vimeo comment said “seems like it shouldn't work”, until you see it. This was filmed on a simple blue backdrop to allow us to shoot in our NY & LA studios simultaneously. It was a Vimeo staff pick and still gets lots of plays. And in an odd form of flattery, Guitar Center made a (lousy) imitation of this for one of their TV commercials.
ROBOT REPAIR’S WEBSITE
With several branches of CMS delivering constantly evolving reels, music playlists, user access points and the ability to manage ongoing projects, it’s hard to show a production company’s website in a portfolio. The constant challenge for us was attempting to seamlessly integrate multiple external CMS / streams which we had little control over — while attempting to make them feel integrated and central to one website — and while keeping dev costs minimal. That’s a lot to juggle. Over the years, the website became less integral to our work (everyone just sends direct links during a production).
Since Robot Repair’s clients were mostly advertising creatives and producers, we decided to make something commmmpletely ridiculous to announce our newly designed website. We thought it would be hilarious to use old business stock videos and talk about it as if a new website was the most revolutionary & technologically advanced thing in the world.
Album art for Spotify playlists to promote new acquisitions to the Robot Repair Music Collection.
Robot Repair’s first printed DVD Reel. (Remember those?) Our first marketing materials used NASA satellite images of the breakup of the Ross Ice Shelf, creating a beautiful, intricate, catastrophic landscape—and tiny Atari robots attempting to fix it. Reels like these were constantly evolving. This may have been my favorite graphic design project ever.
"Found Tapes" was an ongoing newsletter addition featuring found audio from random thrift store cassette tapes.
Our promos were often more effective when they were oddly entertaining vs a direct sales message.
We made and endless string of social media videos to promote new releases and new artists Robot Repair represented for licensing. Some were general promos showing the range of artists and some were for specific additions. The second video above announced adding the African vintage record label “Analog Africa.” The video was created in After-Effects based on the artwork from their album covers.
For many years longer than our web developers thought appropriate, we had a very simple, beautifully clunky website which I designed based on medical equipment control-panels. It broke every rule for web design but our clients loved it. It had fun brightly colored rollovers and played silly blirpy robot sounds when you clicked things. It was delightfully low-fi UI at a time when the internet was starting to get Google-y (and boring).
A few outdoor adventure films. Personal projects really, but made at the time social media influencers were starting to take off.
I was considering going down that path… nah.
The banner for my blog, Aldenland.
Loved by many, this blog has gotten SO much attention over the years.
Sadly (but for the sake of progress) I sold the land in December of 2023.
But the memories and skills we learned here will carry on…under other trees.