December 24, 2007: "Happy Holidays 2007!"

Author:
M. Savinelli

Concept:
We wanted to do a holiday themed ad, but really didn’t have a clue what it should be other than that it should have some sort of numismatic angle. Then, in a moment of inspiration that would have made Archimedes proud, we came up with the idea to decorate the tiny tree on a 1652 Massachusetts Pine Tree Shilling.

But that was just the beginning. In typical CRO fashion (i.e. with absurd attention to what most people would consider to be trivial details) we had to make it just right, creating little tiny Christmas ornaments and placing them in a symmetrical inverted triangle shape while being careful to arrange the different colors so that they were spread aesthetically throughout. The presents below would have to be in similar colors and of varying sizes, and, like the gold star on top, three-dimensional. And all would have to be lit from the same imaginary light source casting a consistent shadow on the lower right of all of them. Yes, we actually did all that in Photoshop.

Captions that didn’t make the cut:
None. We were too tired after decorating the tree to think of any others.