A global brand handed me the rules. I found the good part.
A typeface only they can use. One yellow. Fixed logo placement. The identity was set long before I got there, and the product is a black circle sold on cost per hour. Everything that was still mine to decide had to happen inside that.
15 spreads
the data guide alone, plus trade advertising, digital and sales tools
Two audiences
industrial buyers and the racing world, one brand system
One color
Continental yellow, and nothing competing with it
The challenge.
Continental is a global brand with a fixed identity: a proprietary typeface licensed to them alone, one yellow, a locked logo placement, all of it written down and enforced. Nothing here was going to be reinvented.
And the product is the least photogenic thing in advertising. Industrial tires are black, they are round, and the reasons to buy one are a table of numbers — wear rate, rolling resistance, running temperature, total cost of ownership.
So the decisions left were the ones underneath: what gets emphasis, what gets cut, and how dense technical material can read as confident rather than crowded.
Fleet managers don’t fall for anything. They just do the math.
The idea.
Strip the color out of everything that is not the brand. Photography runs black and white, product sits on black or grey, and Continental yellow is reserved for the headline, the rule and the single number that matters. On a trade page full of competitors shouting, restraint reads as confidence.
Then give the dense material a shape. Every piece runs the same spine: a claim in the headline, the evidence directly beneath it, and the proof points boxed so a reader can skim or commit, as they choose.
Yellow is the only color.
It carries the logo block, the headline accent and the key figure. Everything else is black, white and grey, so the eye has one place to go.
Product as hero, lit hard.
Tread detail, sidewall, the curve of the shoulder. The product photography is the argument that the copy then backs up.
Two voices, one system.
Technical for the industrial buyer, human for the racing audience. Same grid, same color, different register.
The data guide
Fifteen spreads of commercial and industrial tire specifications: pneumatics, radials, cross-plys, solids and press-on bands, each with its own size tables, load ratings and article numbers. The brief here is the opposite of an ad. Nobody reads it front to back. They open it looking for one number.
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So the system is built for finding rather than reading. Each product series gets a tab running down the outer edge, so a thumb can find a section without opening the book. Section dividers run full-bleed with the series name set large. Spec tables use alternating row shading and a fixed column order, so once you have read one table you can read all of them.
I came up in magazine production, buying paper and laying out every issue, and a book like this is where that shows. You think in signatures and press sheets, not PDF pages. The cover and back cover are one piece of paper. The page count has to work on press before it works on screen. None of that is visible in the finished piece, which is rather the point.
The advertising
Two audiences, two registers, one set of rules. The industrial pages sell with numbers. The racing pages sell with people.
Industrial
Press-on bands, resilients, pneumatics. These ran in trade press for an audience that reads specs for a living, so the pages carry real detail — a cost-per-hour chart, a total cost of ownership breakdown, features and benefits side by side.
ChampTruck
The racing sponsorship needed the opposite treatment. Same yellow, same logo block, but the subject is a person and the headline is something they said. Each driver gets a portrait against their own truck, the quote set large across the bottom of the image, and their story in the yellow band beneath. One template, and the only thing that changes is the person.
Inside somebody else’s rules is where most real work happens.
ROLE: Design and layout across print advertising, digital, sales tools and the tire data guide, working within Continental’s global brand standards.