homes.com seasonal initiatives
graphic designer, art director, & animator
a series of sports-related reels, emails, and graphics for homes.com.
in 2024, homes.com launched their national ad campaign, which is the biggest marketing campaign in real estate history. the goal of the campaign is to bring competition to market, generate traffic, and supercharge agents’ success across america. after the super bowl, homes.com began interacting with other popular sports events throughout the year, which is the reason the seasonal initiative began.
this project was divided into multiple waves, each one being focused on one sports event—opening day, march madness, and so on. each project consisted of social media content, including ads and animation reels as shown below, custom emails, and occasionally landing pages for consumer interaction and prizes.
for the first project (shown on the right), march madness, my role throughout the project was to oversee the project strategy, art direction, and deliverables across various platforms. i created a series of emails and the animation reel for social media. i also concepted and assisted with the webpage idea that allowed consumers to predict march madness bracket winners, which resulted in the winning guess to receive a limited edition homes.com varsity jacket, which was worn by dan levy in the homes.com 2024 super bowl commercial. fun fact: that very said varsity jacket was designed by me!
i created the animation by first creating a storyboard in order to brainstorm my train of thought and layout the overall process. once the music had been chosen, i began animating the video in full until i was satisfied. then, i passed this video off to our external animator who edited the reel further, making detailed updates so the animation would pop more—such as the creation of the 3d basketball, 3d location pin, and some of the glistening text transitions. the reason i chose to send my animation to an external animator for edits was because, though the initial video looked great and would have worked just fine for social media, i wanted a few elements to be more elevated, and that’s exactly what they were able to achieve. in return, i was able to work on my skillset, learn from the animator, and practice some of the harder aspects of animation and motion graphics. other than that, the biggest challenge with this project was creating all of its deliverables in a short time period as working on animations, and multiple other deliverables, in a small window of time can be hard to pull off. it was also a challenge to ensure the project’s strategy was strong enough and carried across all platforms seamlessly. this train of thought is the very reason why we decided to halt the project halfway through and brainstorm our end-goal. it was then that we decided we should create a landing page for the homes’ bracket challenge, as we decided that would allow for the most user interaction and overall best functionality. you can find the bracket challenge site here.
for the second project (shown on the left), opening day, my role throughout the project was to oversee the project strategy, the entire art direction, and creation of (a portion of) the final deliverables across various platforms. i created a series of emails and the animation reel for social media. the first step of this involved creating a storyboard that outlined the importance of homes.com, the membership, testimonials, and sharing the word on social. i believe that storyboarding is the most crucial part of animation videos due to the fact that they’re the essence of the concept stage—they visualize your train of thought, the main idea, the layout, and the story. i then picked out the music that felt upbeat and positive, and i passed it off to our external animator who animated the video to similarly match the other seasonal (march madness) reel that i had animated previously. he utilized my detailed storyboard when animating, following my art direction, assets, imagery and files, and edits. one of the best pieces of this reel, for me, was the creation of the 3d baseball that made the reel look more realistic and impactful.
the work included: art direction, graphic design, animation, email design, & final mock-ups
note: this project was produced at homes.com, and is the sole property of homes.com.
