In creating this concept, I pulled from expressions of Cuban culture, include the trumpet (a part of the sound of Cuba), the flag colors combing out of the trumpet, murals both contemporary and vintage. And added little touches of Spanish, for instance here using the emphatic “¡hola cubano!” ing We had a one week turnaround on this one and had to think fast.

The key choice I made was, because the design book was still being developed and unsettled, I had a feeling: we should use their character “Gus” like they’ve never used him before, an enthusiastic showman who, like Bugs Bunny, changes appearance to fit the moment. In this case, I opted for a vintage look from old Cuban dance halls. To play up the “vintage cartoon” feel I wanted for the Gus character I studied old cartoons including Betty Boop.

The response from client to using Gus as a lead element was emphatic, “…this could break the floodgates, we can use him in fun ways like this everywhere. If we’re not careful, he could take over. But maybe that’s a good thing.” They’ve taken to doing so since.

COPY: Ham it up, pork it up, gobble it down. Our new Cubano is toasty and hot 🔥 (and here til it's not)!

Paid Instant Experience: This was a novel design experience for me as I had never designed a “Instant Experience” post before, one in which you click and “explore” further. Once I had the video in the slide locked in, and given the tight timeline, and that all the content was focused on Cubano, I built off of that video to create this. 

I used “click the sandwich” as my CTA as I felt it was such an unusual and funny statement to see that it would guarantee amazing clickthrough rates — client agreed and loved it. When you click the sandwich you become able to scroll down, and so I thought it’d be cool to have it open into a “sandwich gallery.” Sadly, the timeline was so fast on this, we didn’t even have time to shoot new assets that could have really pushed the ingredient details to the next level.

COPY: Why are our Lemon Cheesecake Cookies only back for a short time? It was all they could squeeze in. 🍋

IDEA: Our limitation challenge was serious: how can we use existing brand elements to come up with a concept?

A rapid one-week turnaround with this unit meant we had to think fast. With this unit we explored several different approaches, including the lemons going into an old-timey thingamajig and coming out as lemon cookies.

Client chose this option and we built in added touches, some of which were mine: the jar shaking as it creating some magical transformative effect, the final lemon cookie sliding into the product name lock up, and the tabs coming out at the end. All these little elements helped give a attention keeping aspect to the creative.