Holiday Gift Guide
Digital Trends - Best Art DirectionGoal
The annual Digital Trends holiday gift guide allows Digital Trends’ internal creative team to flex their muscles. This year, the goal was to create an engaging, on-trend guide that garnered attention on social media to bolster brand awareness, to showcase products to increase affiliate sales, and to further establish the Digital Trends creative team with trade magazines.
Best Art Direction Overview
Digital Trends partnered with animation studio HouseSpecial to produce their annual holiday gift guide, this time telling a gift-giving story in elaborate miniature scenes. The feature will showcase gift ideas for tech lovers, hand selected by the editorial staff at Digital Trends. The visual stories created for the gift guide use human-sized everyday objects and tiny character models. Leading the team is HouseSpecial Director/Art Director Gee Staughton, whose stop-motion work includes the awarding-winning Chipotle short, “Back to the Start,” and campaigns for Planters, Travel Portland, noosa and Dish Network.
Sessions Generated to Date
100,000+
The Art
The figures were designed in HO scale or 1:87, which is the traditional scale for model railroads.
The images are snapshots into an odd reality and feature rich, tiny custom handmade details. For example, miniature home chefs in a cooking class prepare dinner on sharp cheese knives, a naked man with tan lines gets a massage beside a pool made from a repurposed giftable book and a street performer plays his guitar under the shadow of a looming city created with pink suitcases and black wireless speakers. Readers who look closely and investigate each scene will be rewarded with funny little “Easter eggs.”
Gift Idea Categories
- The Foodie
- The Traveler
- The Audio / Entertainment Junkie
- Parents & Grandparents
- The DIY Freak
“Thinking outside the box and creatively using miniature pieces has been our forte for years. This project was especially fun because it challenged us to create visual narratives that are captured in a single frame—with the additional caveat we could only use a very limited palette of elements and colors to create that world,”
“Partnering with Digital Trends was a journey in melding the mediums of handcrafted miniatures, practical products and digital programming. The combined forces of our veteran stop motion pros with Alana Wolfman and her team of creative producers resulted in playful, creatively fluent content that is wholly unique to Digital Trends previous Holiday Guides. We hope you enjoy our whimsical tableaux and start your holiday shopping!”
In the Media
Behind the Scenes
Building the Set & Scenes
The Sketches
