Gibson Robot Guitar [spec ad]
Whenever I show anyone this ad, I always get the same question: Is this a real product?
The answer is yes, and it is FABULOUS. A real Gibson quality guitar that can TUNE ITSELF.
If you couldn’t tell by my enthused response, I’m something of a guitar nerd. And yes, I will admit, with my spec work, I’m guilty of bringing in a lot of my personal interests and loves as fodder for my advertisements. But I don’t see this as a sin necessarily. It’s important to show diversity in spec work, but I also feel spec work is a place to really let your work show who you are in real life: Your interests, your passions, and your personality can all shine through in creative ways with good spec work.
As for this particular piece, I would say this is one of my favorites, if not the best one I’ve done, for a number of reasons.
Firstly, this is the first piece I attempted to art direct for myself. I will always say, I’m not an artist, but I am a very visual thinker. I’ve been teaching myself Adobe Photoshop in an ongoing attempt to improve my ability to communicate with art directors and graphic designers. I can’t take all the credit for this, because I was given some help by Dan Berkowitz on this one, but for the most part this was designed and constructed by me. It was an interesting experience, and I’m making a continuing effort to improve and refine my design skill.
Secondly, I just think it’s a clever concept. The moment I began thinking up concepts for a Robot guitar ad, the first things that popped into my head were the Terminator and HAL. From there, the ad just flowed naturally. It’s a guitar that senses tone, essentially hearing your strings. So “It’s listening” came immediately to me. From there, I took the guitar and realized, from a certain view, it has a kind of anthropomorphic structure. So I put it down in the corner, and it all clicked. It looked like a mischievous little robot eavesdropping. It’s a little creepy, but it’s almost like a humor time bomb; your first response is a little yelp, and then laughter. At least, that’s the intention. Take a look and tell me what you think.
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