Forbidden Forest Halloween Seasonal Concept
Art Director/Concept
This started as an internal concept pitch for Home Depot's 2025 Halloween seasonal environment. The standard Halloween approach at retail tends to feel like the same things in a slightly different arrangement every year. I wanted to see what it looked like if we actually committed to an environment...a different world.
The idea was a forbidden forest. Tree portals as gateways into the Halloween area. Exaggerated directional signposts pointing customers toward Skeletons, Costumes, Tombstones. A woodcut illustration style that leaned into Tim Burton and Dr. Seuss equally. Spooky but not too scary, atmospheric but still shoppable. I figured most of the team was going to do something very Harry Potter so I wanted to lean in a different direction. Further, I think the client was expecting Harry Potter.
The moodboard itself was an experiment. The usual approach is a board full of images that don't quite speak the same visual language but still try to create the outline of an idea.
I ran everything through Adobe Firefly to unify the illustration style across all the reference imagery with the same texture, same palette, same feel throughout. The result was something closer to a finished creative proposal than a mood board. You could actually see what the space might feel like. Since this was generated by Firefly, and thus licensed, we would be free to use Topaz Labs Gigapixel and other tools to upsize these elements and actually use them in the finished pieces.
It wasn't selected. But I learned something about how to use AI as a "cohesion tool" rather than a generation tool, which was a big first step toward getting AI tools cleanly into our conceptual workflow.
