“Build Yours” Harley-Davidson Ad Campaign

I saw this “Build Yours” Harley-Davidson ad campaign and it reminded me of a piece of artwork that I saw at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles by Vik Muniz. The piece that I saw at the Getty was a large scale photograph of his work, “Saturn Devouring One of His Sons After Goya,” 2005. Muniz recreated the painting by Francisco Goya, “Saturn Devouring One of His Sons,” 1819-1823. He used a large warehouse as his palette, items collected from a junkyard as his paint and photographed it when it was completed. If you get a chance to check his work out, do so! It’s amazing because when you look closely at his photograph, you’ll see the old tires, refrigerators, barrels and whatever else you would find in a junkyard.

Now, back to the “Build Yours,” Harley-Davidson ad campaign by Carmichael Lynch. This ad is very interesting because when you first look at the ad, you see the faces. Then when you look closer at the ad, you wonder how they created the faces because it is not a drawing or painting. They utilized parts of a motorcycle to create the faces in their campaigns and integrated a simple phrase, “Build Yours,” with the logo in the lower right-hand corner to enhance the meaning of the photograph. I don’t normally see this type of artistic Harley-Davidson ad because the ads that I have seen, usually had a more rugged type of feeling. I’m guessing they were targeting a much different audience with this campaign. Nowadays you don’t just see older males riding Harley’s but also younger age groups, both males and females.

Graduate Walk Through

I was able to attend the Graduate Walk Through on Saturday and the work that I believe was most interesting, was the work of Joe Bautista. His campaign for Adobe CS4 tied well together with the colors and images he chose.

The visual display in the backroom was also very interesting. After observing it for a while, the way he was able to integrate the text with the manikin was very creative.

I've posted a photo of one of the sections, "Performing," from his Annual Report. In each of the sections of the Annual, whether it were the places he had eaten at or how many emails he had sent, Bautista represented each section with a symbol, with simplicity which was very pleasing to the eye. This technique made the Report Annual very interesting and I hope to see more of his work in the future.