GATOR CASES | Jivey Designs

Gator Cases, Inc.

A 20-year+ family-owned and operated Instrument Case and Accessory Manufacturer based out of the Tampa Bay area. With this account, I've worked closely with the Amazon and Marketing teams to follow their design standards and stay within brand guidelines. Which are detailed below.

Typography

Since Gator Cases is an established brand, they already have an established brand identity, including typefaces that are expected to be used throughout their content. In many ways, this was a fantastic boon to my process. Giving me a guideline of options to work with, and font families to work around. This image shows just a few of the major fonts that I was allowed to use and explore while designing materials for this brand. My personal favorites are Barlow and Avenir. Simple fonts evoke both luxurious modernity and humble traditionalism through the grotesque visual quirks of Barlow and the geometric futurism of Avenir.

Color Ways

Similarly to typefaces, Gator has several established Color ways. This is because the Gator family consists of several brands, including Levy's Leathers, Slappa, and the Lines of Gator Frameworks and Gator Rackworks. While Rackworks and Frameworks tend to follow the same color ways of the Traditional Gator line. There are small variations. Rackworks, specifically in it's past, used to often use an electric blue that has since been retired for the colorways of frameworks which tends to lean on the off-blacks and deep maroons/reds to evoke modern luxury and passion. On the flip-side, Levy's Leathers, a brand acquired in 2018, leans more toward the rugged outdoorsy folk. As such it's color pallet tends to be more earthy. With pops of contrasting colors. On the opposite side of the spectrum we find Slappa, a brand acquired in 2017. This brand focuses on strong contrast with it's pallet being very "Techy" influenced. With simple stand black and white bases and Bright teal/green to catch your eye. A few of these colors are shown to the right. My personal favorites from this set of colorways are the toned down Orange (#EA6952) and the Deep Forest Green (#373A37).

#EA6952

#373A37

Creative Content

My Work Specifically for Gator Cases has focused on marketing and advertisement collateral for the Amazon Platform. This has ranged from Web Icons used for the "Brand Stories", found on Product Detail Pages (PDPs) across the platform, to staged product mock-ups for A+ Content, and even simple infographics repurposed from Marketing Materials created by the amazing in-house team. Some of my favorites are shown in the above graphic, which just looks nice in my opinion. But, I wanted to show a bit of my iteration Process below, with a piece that was not officially used as of yet. See below.

My Process Explained

In this first iteration, I was focused more on showing the artist's official photo, as it appears in their marketing materials, as well as broadly showing off the band name. Finally, I wanted to still predominantly show off that this was a Gator Cases Artist by including the Tag Line "Guard it with Gator". But the more I looked at it, the less it felt like an actual endorsement from this artist. It just felt like a cheap call out.

In this second version, I wanted to give this Header more of a "Touched by the Artist" kind of vibe. The placement of this asset was going to be the first thing a customer saw when they went to our "Artist Selection" Storefront. So I wanted it to really feel a lot more like the artist. I even strayed from the typical Fonts used by Gator to have a "Hand written" aethetic. Ultimately, though This meant I needed to do some more research. After checking out past Album covers and magazine articles on the band. I felt led to this more "Dreamy" Starscape with an otherworldly glow. But something still felt wrong.

Thinking I might be over thinking the whole thing I decided to apply "KISS" (Keep it Stupid Simple) to this process and pulled back on the effects and stars. A simple black background, the band, a feature call out and some whispy fire. Still this didn't feel Aggressive enough to represent Meshuggah, a predominantly Death Metal Band. And after taking a look at their most recent Album cover I figured out what I needed to do.

That's how I ended here. Their most recent cover features a see-through man standing in front of a cloud of billowing dark smoke with flecks of firey orange. The man has psaces where you can see bone, muscle, and organs, with fire breaching through his chest where his heart would be. He's also holding a dagger. The whole subject is outlined in this orange glow. I mention this because after genuinely viewing the image I found myself inspired.

Searching through free photos on Unsplash, I found the perfect flames to use as my foreground. After some blending in Photoshop, I then took the stars-like background and replaced it behind the band. This time using them to create an effect of embers. From here I scaled the otherwordly-esque flame so that it would create a frame funneling the viewer's attention from the fire to the band. Here I outlined the band in a glow and finally edited the original photo to bring out the faces of the band. While still capturing the mystique brought on by the heavy shadows of the original.