As some of you in New England may have noticed, Dunkin’ Donuts is running a new Patriots promotion. Actually, they’re running a few, but I worked on the “Patriots in Miami” promotion. I was excited to work on this because any day that I can design for a sports project is a great day. One of my favorite aspects of my job came into play with this project: Giving the client something more than what they expected.

Often a client will give you their thoughts on what a design should look like. This is a given because nobody is going to pay you to just go and design whatever you want. The client’s vision is usually different than my initial thought. I’ll design the piece the way they described. But then I’ll go off and try something different. The great thing about where I work is that they allow the client to see both their vision, and an alternate. I’ve worked in places where I’m only allowed to show the client what they specificially requested, no matter how ugly it is. I’m probably batting around .500 with my alternates.To backtrack a little, I spent two and a half years designing baseball caps, websites and other sales collateral for Twins Enterprise in Boston. So when the Patriots piece came along at my current job, it was right up my alley. My original thought was to use a Patriots jersey as the background texture. Then I combined this with swooping shapes using the team’s colors. The most time consuming part of this work (for me) was writing “Grand Prizes” and making it look like the Patriots script. After I designed the initial scratch tickets and the counter card, I had to hand off the project due to additional work that was piling up. So, the next time you’re in a Dunkin’ Donuts, order a breakfast sandwich and check out the Patriots stuff. Just make sure it’s the red and navy Patriots materials. I had nothing to do with the orange and green Chris Berman promotion.