DATES:
February 1999-May 1999

SPECIFICS:
HTML production, graphic editing, quality assurance testing, creation of banner ads and catalog artwork.

OVERVIEW:
I was brought in to Saatchi & Saatchi Los Angeles (Toyota's advertising agency) to work on the launch of the Toyota Tundra, a large-scale national sales initiative, by Aquent Partners. Originally, I was to work on translating the art direction of staffers into HTML, but I ended up working on a number of other projects.

I was immediately asked to help out with making and optimizing banner ads for Southern California dealership sites involved in a tent sale event. After that, I was asked to take art from the company's printed associate catalog and prepare them for the web. I was tasked to a project manager and given the task of updating and refreshing the HTML and graphics on the Toyota Motor Insurance Services sub-site, and asked to create a really cool graphical treatment from a Quicktime movie source file involvig a BMX team Toyota sponsored.

All of that was completed before returning to the Tundra project, which involved coding the page seen above, the rest of the pages for the site (including a tricky embed of a quicktime demo) and creating and optimizing the production graphics for it. I had a very good time working on every project and enjoyed it thoroughly. Toyota's website has since been redesigned three times, but I kept copies of the Tundra pages I coded for my own records as one of my favorite projects.

As the second quarter of 1999 drew to a close, Toyota tightened its belt in regards to its marketing and new media budgets, forcing a large staff reduction at Saatchi & Saatchi, including me.