I was with a creative team with Young & Rubicam, Los Angeles, in the role of Senior Designer made up of other designers, copywriters and art directors, working on a wide range of clients in the travel, media, hospitality with my assignment being the Jaguar U.S. in-market brand refresh. Collaboration was a must and an open mind was and always is key.

There is a moment in the careers of many people that we all stop and think “This. THIS is on what I want to be working!” Working with Young & Rubicam: Wunderman Brands in Orange County, CA was the initial satisfaction. Being asked to work on Jaguar/Land Rover was just a cherry on-top. Jaguar pulled the trigger on creating in-showroom assets to better engage the expendable income demographic. After a then-new market study, Jaguar noticed a trend that their client base preferred to research their purchases online first with as much information possible. It was no longer the time of walking in and kicking the tires, that part generally came just before purchase. This demographic was most-likely to enter a showroom ready-to-purchase after research—the initial part of this group wanted a “breadcrumb” of sorts as a reminder to research their options. Knowing that, we were tasked with overhauling the original brochures that were given to legacy Jaguar clients into a slicker, amenity-immersive take away that was much more contemporary than the prior versions that were intended for repeat customers.

Working with the Wunderman Team at Young & Rubicam in Orange County, CA, I was pulled into the rebrand of the Jaguar XKR-S and revise the prior campaign for the dealership collateral to appeal to their newly-discovered demographic of 33-48 year olds with disposable income. Converting the original, older working files from the last campaign from Quark to InDesign while maintaining file integrity was the first step—developing a new, cohesive, flash persona for the marketing materials was it’s own undertaking.

The XKR-S is not merely the quickest Jaguar ever but also the most agile, responsive and driver-focused. As with competition Jaguars of the past, the exterior of the XKR-S adheres to the principle of form following function. The XKR-S embodies all the characteristics that have always defined legendary Jaguar GTs – explosive performance, precise handling, relaxed comfort and discreet luxury – while taking Jaguar into a new performance level. The Jaguar XKR-S now possesses a number of revisions that reinforce its contemporary, assertive character.

There was one hurdle—Jaguar wanted to print the same dimensions as the previous collateral. Y&R was updating from Quark to InDesign and was in this tenuous period of using plugins to attempt to salvage as much as the original files as possible as Quark was no longer giving support. In this, my technological savvy directly paid off. Without giving up trade secrets, I asked for the group of files and over the course of two days converted them to an InDesign-manageable format and we got to designing our hearts out. Our showroom collateral went from a dry, stuffy, status-symbol-based brochure that reaffirmed to clients that they made the right upgrade to a more-engaging, dynamic, “open this car up and feel it” spirit from copy to design. As soon as both the in-showroom informative larger-format brochure and the 22-page take away guide hit the hands of the “breadcrumb” seekers, sales hit a sharp upswing.