Year
2025
Client
Cardo Systems
Category
Seasonal Campaign
Product Duration
1-2 weeks
The Valentine’s Day 2025 campaign was a seasonal sales initiative built around a 22% promotional offer, aimed at riders who travel in pairs—couples, friends, and long-distance partners. The objective was to increase short-term sales while reinforcing Cardo’s brand as emotionally aware, premium, and lifestyle-driven rather than purely technical.
I led the creative execution as designer, 3D artist, animator, and sound designer, producing the campaign’s most stylized visual assets. The broader studio supported stills and generic posts, while I focused on high-impact video and hero imagery.
The design challenge was to balance romance and playfulness with Cardo’s established brand language. The visuals needed to feel warm and expressive without becoming novelty-driven or off-brand.
I leaned into saturated, stage-like lighting, controlled color palettes, and deliberate composition to evoke an intimate, gift-focused mood. A holographic 3D text treatment became a central visual motif, adding a sense of elegance and spectacle while keeping the messaging modern and premium. Sound design was treated as a core design layer, reinforcing timing, emotion, and polish.
The concept was built around the idea of a romantic night out—dinner, atmosphere, anticipation, and gifting—translated into an abstract visual narrative rather than literal storytelling. Instead of realism, the goal was emotional clarity.
A key early decision was to reveal the product using a fabric-like motion over a heart form. This choice defined the animation style, lighting direction, and pacing across the campaign. Rather than referencing competitors or user data directly, the direction relied on internal brand intuition and visual taste, with the goal of creating something memorable, expressive, and distinctly “Cardo.”
The campaign was executed using Blender, After Effects, and Premiere Pro. The centerpiece animation relied on cloth simulations to achieve a soft, cinematic reveal, requiring multiple iterations to dial in timing and motion quality. Lighting was intentionally theatrical, prioritizing mood and contrast over realism.
Late in production, device changes were requested close to launch, eliminating the option to re-render. I solved this through targeted compositing and visual manipulation in After Effects, allowing the campaign to ship on schedule without compromising visual quality.
The final output included approximately 12 videos and dozens of images, deployed across social media, Google ads, and website banners. While performance metrics were tracked elsewhere, the campaign helped position Cardo as a brand capable of producing high-end, emotionally driven creative entirely in-house.
