NYU Tandon's Agents of Optimism — Sheldon "RONIN" Smith

NYU Tandon’s Agents of Optimism Campaign

A campaign to tell the story of NYU Tandon’s researchers in a new, parallel way to Tandon’s Unconventional Engineers campaign, launched as holiday marketing efforts, with a focus on an optimistic approach to research and an optimistic outlook on the future. The goal was to fashion our faculty and researchers as the true superheroes that they are, working diligently to create a diverse, healthier, safer, more sustainable future. The creative approach was inspired by ‘80s and ‘90s Marvel superhero trading cards, juxtaposed against a modern WPAP art illustration aesthetic, in an effort to call to mind the nostalgia of a forgotten medium while leveraging the worldwide craze of modern big budget superhero movies.

This campaign was executed across video, print mailers in the form of comic books and trading cards, and a webpage to showcase our engineers to peer institutions and the general public. It was featured in Jim Tudor’s article for LinkedIn, “7 sparks of HE marketing excellence that inspired us in 2022”. See the campaign

Responsibilities:

CREATIVE DIRECTION

GRAPHIC DESIGN

ILLUSTRATION

PRINT DESIGN & LAYOUT

FILM DIRECTION

The Trailer

I contracted Transcendent Enterprise to handle film production, editing, and vfx while I handled Film Director duties. All in all, 12 videos were produced for this campaign, 1 trailer, and 11 individual videos highlighting each faculty member/ superhero.

A Lengthy Creative Process

I began production by creating digital illustrations on top of portrait photography of our faculty and researchers. Color choices all came from NYU Tandon’s Identity style guide and denote the 7 areas of research excellence Tandon prides itself on.

Eleven faculty members were selected to participate in “Series One” of this campaign. Each participant was illustrated for trading cards and filmed for video assets. Superhero names were created based on the nature of the research each participant conducts, this was a very iterative, fun, and exploration phase of production.

The Cards

We printed several sets of 12 trading cards that we called “Series One”.
Each card was printed two-sided on old school trading card stock with details about the strengths of each superhero.