In Their Boots

Project Overview

Client: Florida Department of Transportation
Role: Art Director, Designer
Scope: Advertising Campaign

For this campaign, our team was tasked with elevating awareness for Florida’s Work Zone Awareness Week, a statewide initiative aligned with the national NWZAW movement. Each spring, as construction season begins, the campaign reminds drivers to stay alert and use extra caution when traveling through highway work zones.

My Role

I led the creative approach by designing a campaign that puts viewers inside the work zone—seeing, hearing, and feeling what crews experience every day. The visuals emphasize how small actions at highway speeds have big consequences: a few feet, a few mph, or a single glance at a phone can mean lane drift, missed brake lights, or gusts strong enough to shove cones and workers. Through immersive, safety‑forward design, I aimed to motivate drivers to slow down, avoid sudden lane changes, stop tailgating, and stay alert.

Design Approach

Because the campaign required immersive visuals without the budget for custom photography, I built the imagery through a structured AI‑to‑Photoshop workflow. I began by using Midjourney to generate concept frames exploring motion, proximity, and the sensory tension of active work zones. I iterated through dozens of prompts to dial in composition, lighting, and camera perspective—treating the AI outputs as rough art‑direction studies rather than finished assets.

From there, I brought the selected images into Photoshop for extensive refinement. This included compositing, color grading, motion treatment, texture cleanup, and environmental adjustments to create realism and continuity across the campaign. The process allowed me to craft visuals that placed the viewer inside the work zone while still maintaining control over mood, clarity, and storytelling.

While custom photography would strengthen a concept like this, the workflow became a valuable exercise in prompt‑driven art direction, technical problem‑solving, and advanced image manipulation under real‑world constraints.