AgroKrag Graphic Design/Illustration, Web Design, Web Marketing

It was one of the most hard fought runs at the title in years. The displays of guts and desire that the Boston Celtics put forth in the past month and a half is unrivaled in my opinion. Being a basketball fan it is easy to get caught up in the win to win nature of the playoffs, but when you stop and look back at what we all witnessed, it really was something special.

This team was went from being the most dominant in the NBA to being nearly eliminated by the up-and-coming Atlanta Hawks in the span of 15 days. They looked like a team too content with its regular season record, and had a coach who was over thinking every move. The next series was no different, again pushed to the brink of elimination. Until game 7 that is. When Paul Pierce and Lebron James put on that show ( The AgroKrag team was there live ) I knew that this was going to be an intense run through the rest of the playoffs. The Celtics were a team reborn, they were like a middle aged couple rediscovering each other after a term of complacency.

Amazingly with those first two series behind them the task seemed to get easier, Detroit never looked like a team that had a prayer in that series. Then came the Lakers…this series marks the first time in my life that I have watched a game more than one time. I watched game 4 (the 24 point comeback) live and was so dumbfounded that we won, that it took 2 subsequent viewings for it to set in fully. The DVD set that will inevitably come out should serve as a companion piece to the most inspirational of sports movies. Paul Pierce in my opinion solidified his position in both Celtics Lore and the NBA Hall of Fame.

Since the team gave up so much of themselves to bring a title not only to themselves but to a town that has managed to write off all championship-less teams in the past few years, I decided to pay tribute. This isn’t for the fans (particularly the fair-weather Garnett jersey clad fans), this was created for the Players. Whether this will be seen by any of them is a big question mark, but that is no different than what they did on the court. They played regardless of knowing I was watching, so I painted regardless of them watching, it is what we do.

Go Celtics! and thank you for inspiring a legion of fans with the heart you showed all season long.

-Jesse Rand (The AgroKrag Team)

We at AgroKrag were recently commissioned to design a series of illustrations for the launch of GroupGain.com’s “Buzz Campaign.” The service offered is a means to buying goods at discount bulk prices. This gives buyers the power to lower the prices of the products they want. In order to drive traffic to the site GroupGain wanted to leverage their existing user base. The simple solution to this was offering a free MP3 player obviously! The campaign launched a couple months ago, but the big problem with it wasn’t the designs it was the fact that they didn’t have any existing users to leverage, thus the campaign is sitting in limbo on the site. The ides behind the project is solid it just needs further development, until then we have these pretty attractive ads on their site.

As a side note; GroupGain hired our designer Jesse Rand to put together a Flash animated tutorial video which can be viewed here. Clocking in at just under 8 minutes this thing was quite an undertaking and we are very proud of Jesse for all the hours put into this video.

If you like what you see on GroupGain.com or in Jesse’s Flash Tutorial please contact us as we are always open to Flash projects.