Michael Pitzer » Kawasaki Dirt Bikes

Kawasaki Dirt Bikes – Print Campaign

Posted: September 8th, 2011 by: MPitzer comments: 2

This series of full-color, spread ads are from a two-year print campaign developed for Kawasaki’s line of dirt bikes.

While I was working as Associate Creative Director at Bozell Worldwide in Los Angeles, Cameron Day and I had the opportunity to create some wonderful, clean, double-page spreads for the dirt bike portion of Kawasaki. The first sample won my first Art Director’s pencil for creative use of type which was awesome in that I hand-cut the headline font which was then made available by Drew Andresen of Andresen Typographics. That was back when when type was set using a Photo Typositor and the desktop computer was an Apple Quadra 700. It was the first of three headline fonts I created that they fond cool enough to include in their type books.

The ad above was created in one shot for all of the parts and one stripped in inset for the KX. It main shot was taken using an 8×10 camera by Mark McIntyre. We rented the tallest photo studio in Los Angeles and removed one of the large air vents on the roof to shoot through. Using walkie-talkies and string, we laid out the disassembled bike to the exact specification of the magazine using the string to map out bleed, live and trim as well as gutter specs.

In this ad, featuring an extremely dirty KDX200 and even muddier Larry Roeseler, this was the first time Kawasaki ever allowed an ad to run without a traditional “beauty shot” of their featured motorcycle.