Our work ended up on a Times Square billboard — and I was not even there

Background

This story starts a few years back, before Aildco had a name. A client based in New York reached out through a mutual connection. They were working on a brand campaign — a consumer product launch — and needed digital design work that could translate across screens, print, and out-of-home advertising.

The brief was straightforward: design a visual identity system strong enough to work at every scale, from a mobile app icon to a building-sized display. We did not think too much about the "building-sized" part at the time. That was the client's problem to place. Our job was to make the work hold up.

The moment

Months after delivery, a message arrived with a photo attached. No context, just a location pin and an image. The design we had built was running on a digital billboard in Times Square, New York City — one of the most viewed public spaces on the planet.

I was not there. I was sitting at a desk in Baku, looking at my own work on a screen that was thousands of miles away and several stories tall. It is a strange feeling — detached and proud at the same time.

Times Square sees roughly 330,000 pedestrians a day. More than 50 million visitors pass through it each year. I am not sure how many of them noticed the design. But I noticed. And the client noticed. And that was enough.

What it meant

The studio was not called Aildco yet. There was no website, no team, no process. Just the work. Looking back, that billboard was a kind of proof — not to anyone else, but to me — that the work was real, that it reached people, that scale was possible from anywhere.

We share this now not to boast, but because it is the kind of story worth keeping. The work we do is mostly invisible — lines of code, design files, decisions made in calls that nobody records. Every now and then something surfaces in the physical world and reminds you what all of it is for.