Retail Brand, Packaging, and a Centennial

Scope

Small team, broad remit. The range of work was enormous: packaging, brand identity, retail marketing, photography, video, print production, and installation documentation, often in the same week.

Mystik 100 Years

Mystik, CITGO's lubricants brand, was approaching its centennial. I wrote the design brief for the celebration and led the creative.

Rather than designing something new, I re-illustrated a vintage character from historic Mystik advertising and brought it forward for the centennial. A hundred years is not an occasion for a rebrand. It is an occasion to prove the brand has been there the whole time.

The identity extended across a licensed collaboration with Les Friction Revival, apparel, custom coasters, and a custom card deck.

Grease Sample Kit

Packaging design for CITGO's grease sample kit, including the design brief and coordination of contracted illustration work. Physical product, physical constraints, real production tolerances.

Retail marketing at scale

CITGO's retail marketing runs across thousands of stations, and much of it was rebuilt on an annual cycle: campaigns, catalogs, collateral, and the point-of-sale creative all refreshed as programs turned over.

The surfaces are more varied than they look: pump toppers, bollards, cooler clings, counter mats, door strips, fuel service poles, pump handle clings. I designed across all of them: the CITGO Rewards credit card campaign, marketer and retailer flyers, the Street Smarts catalog, the Programs-At-A-Glance catalog, Retail Connections mailers, and a 50,000-piece B2B mailer run.

Point of sale installation guides

The installation guides were part of that annual cycle, and they were the systems problem inside the print work.

Every piece of retail creative had to be installable by a station manager. Installation was not standardized: a piece might mount to a pump, cling to a cooler door, or hang from a pump handle, and the point-of-sale software varied by station. Each system carried its own requirements and its own documentation.

The design problem was not the graphic. It was making the graphic installable correctly by someone who had never seen it before and was not a designer.

Billboards

Two, including a Beaumont board and a Galveston placement. First billboards I had done. Scale changes the problem. You have about two seconds and no second reading.

*If you'd like to see the Mystik brief or the centennial work in detail, get in touch.*