Red Lobster Crab Fest: a Facebook infographic story

A few weeks ago GREY contacted me with a unique idea to create a Snow Crab 101 infographic for Red Lobster's Facebook page. Given the chance to illustrate the life of a snow crab and work with an amazing company such as GREY, I was fast to jump on the opportunity.

GREY sent me a word document rich with researched details and a rough idea to use as a starting point. They wanted a "how to eat" section to accompany the main art, and since the main usage of the piece was Facebook, a roughly 8 x 10 inch dimension was the target size.  Tight fit for the goals we wanted to achieve but a challenge I was looking forward to.

I sketched out a few fast layouts and chose to go with a sidebar for our how-to-eat information. We wanted to have a snow crab as our dominant main art, and I wanted it to tie-in with the main art so it didn't feel separate on the page. GREY was pretty open with layouts, so knowing this was a strong idea I immediately went into sketching a tight rough:

Shooting reference – a great excuse to steam up a few crabs:

Again, when working with clients who are getting constant feedback from their clients (in this case – Red Lobster), I feel the tight pencil roughs save a lot of time on production for all involved. This also gives everyone a piece of mind looking over the details while not leaving anything a surprise later in the game.

 
I had the opportunity to write the text, so I add the copy and their fonts during the rough sketch phase so the client can read through the sketch and see exactly what we want to show. They edit the copy while I work on the final renders and design tweaks, allowing the page to develop together smoothly.

As the illustrations come together, I switch the rwketches with new art and make any text edits that are noted. During this process we cut-cut-cut, to keep the layout from becoming too text heavy. Soon the piece is ready to go:

The final was published on Red Lobsters Facebook page very shortly after. It got a lot of traffic and customer conversation – a win-win for all who was involved.

A special thanks to the talented GREY New York creative team and Red Lobster for giving me the opportunity to eat snow crab and dive into this. You were an absolute pleasure to work with.