Ram Trucks

Services: Illustration
Illustration & Design: Andy Gregg, Aaron Johnson
Creative Direction: Joel Anderson

The Project

The Richards Group out of Dallas, TX saw our National Parks art and commissioned us to develop a series of posters and ads for Ram Trucks that would be inspired by 20th Century Works Progress Administration poster art.

The ads appeared in the 2012-2013 Texas Parks and Wildlife Outdoor Annual Hunting and Fishing Regulations guide, distributed to more than three million avid Texas outdoorsman. The Ram Trucks brand was the exclusive automotive sponsor of the guide.

The Challenge

We needed to create a series of Ram Truck ads featuring illustrative renderings of the Lone Star state’s picturesque Rio Grande Valley, Balanced Rock, Enchanted Rock and Lighthouse Rock landscapes as settings for the Ram 1500 Mossy Oakâ Edition Outdoorsman, Ram 2500 Power Wagon, Ram 1500 Lone Star and Ram 1500 Laramie Longhorn. The art needed to celebrate the rugged beauty of the Texas landscape in a vintage, stylized color palette while accurately depicting each truck model.

The Solution

We created a series of vintage-looking posters about Texas parks that happened to have big trucks in the middle of each scene. To accomplish an authentic WPA look, simplified all the shapes, limited the color palettes, and we created a lot of hand-rendered type for each composition. The finished art became ads, wrapped buildings, and were sold as posters.

Poster Concepts

The biggest challenge on these posters was depicting modern trucks in a vintage poster art style. We used retro color palettes and clear, defined lines with plenty of intentional usage of shadows, contrast, and scale to depict iconic truck models in equally iconic wilderness settings.

Finished Posters

The poster series worked remarkably well. The trucks were as cool as the landscapes, so they both shared the spotlight, achieving the goal of celebrating the majesty of the rugged Texas wilderness while promoting a line of trucks that could get you there and back.