The Home Depot's 23rd Street store sits squarely between 5th and 6th Avenues in the middle of one of the busiest blocks in Manhattan. The front windows face a street with a mid-block stoplight, which means every day, waves of New Yorkers stop directly in front of them and wait. This, in addition to crowds of pedestrians walking past the store during work hours. It's a genuinely public creative stage.

I came onto this project in 2015. THD was spending too much decorating the windows with physical product, so they brought it to us to accomplish with printed materials. As one of several designers competing internally for the window concepts. I won enough consecutive pitches that Home Depot eventually stopped running it as a competition and handed the project to me outright.  Over eleven years the windows have changed out five times annually as seasonal concepts, each one needing to speak to a fast-moving New York sidewalk crowd in the few seconds they have before the light changes.

When I moved into the ACD role, I made a deliberate decision about what to do with it. Day-to-day work at the scale we operate tends toward the production end. Template builds, minor revisions, execution work. Important, but not the kind of work that reveals what someone is really capable of. The window project became a way to change that. I started using it as a development assignment, briefing junior designers and art directors on concepts, letting them run with something highly visible and genuinely creative. It became one of the best tools I had for finding out who on the team had more in them than their daily work suggested and it helped a handful of people get promoted. From that standpoint in particular, I am quite proud of my involvement with this project. 

Fifty-five installations and counting.