I worked with New Orleans Steamboat Company this summer to develop a set of ads for the Steamboat NATCHEZ, Gray Line New Orleans and Café Beignet. This was my first time doing street car ads (I've done streetcar kiosks and station signs before) and It was a great project that involved some new angles of thought.
For the external banners, I treated the job mostly like doing an outdoor billboard since they'd be moving by and viewed by pedestrians and drivers with a short window of attention. But there were new considerations, like background color. Outdoor ads don't have backgrounds (other than the sky, which is hard to control), but the streetcars are red and dark green. So I did light colored ads for Café Beignet and the NATCHEZ, and yellow backgrounds for the Gray Line ads (as opposed to the usual dark blue) that would contrast with the red and dark green streetcars.
The Café Beignet ads also included an interior ad, so I used their dark coffee color as a background to contrast with the streetcar's white interior.
Here are proofs for the ads which are rolling now.
Café Beignet Exterior:
Café Beignet Interior (definition included to give the tourists on the Riverfront streetcar riders something to think about):
Gray Line proposed (my favorite that leveraged the clout of the Gray Line logo shape):
Gray Line actual:
Steamboat NATCHEZ:
On a side note, my photographer wife was showing me her Instagram pics the other night and this one was taken by Matt Foster after a long workday shooing a wedding in the quarter. I said, "awesome pic—love the curved reflection and your pondering expression." Then I noticed what the reflection was of and added "that's an ad I did. You must have been mesmerized by the beauty!" Thanks for letting me share this Matt Foster.
