Brand Building

Here’s a fun little blast — a quick exercise in building a brand, complete withvideo. I still don’t know whether to call this forced perspective or op art.

This painting project was for innovation firmFahrenheit 212, and the idea was to float the company logo over a room from a single vantage point, which you would see only from that vantage point. The elemental components hover in air as you move towards that point and break apart as you move away.

Sure, this is an exercise in company branding writ large — I can’t say whether you would try this at home or with what, but as such I think we succeeded vividly. One is hit first with the total immersion of the visual, seduced by the clever concept and then bam: connection.

There must be something of a provenance to this concept, i.e., I can just picture Florentine architects engaged in similar trompe-l’oeil pursuits. And as ideas go I can’t claim this as my own: the clients knew what they wanted.

Technically, what we did was this: took a diagram of the company logo (the plus sign), superimposed it over a photograph of the room, and went to work replicating. We found a point of engagement near the office front entrance and used a laser lever to make the “drawing” across all surfaces, which cut through the clouds of perception like a cheese slicer. Paint colors were mixed in the exact Pantone shades of the logo — just ask the guys atFine Paints of Europe.

In the end — and this is where you never know if it will work — in my mind we still had to come up with a beautiful environment that will make people want to sit in those chairs before a pitch meeting. And here’s what was thrilling:

I love the Russian Suprematism element that emerged, all those pretty parallelograms floating around the room. The idea still reads even as it breaks apart, and I really do want to curl up on the that sofa and wait for an appointment.

说到这里,我去踢和尖叫put paint on a tufted leather sofa, but I’m glad we did. What finally gave me permission was the articles of whimsy and ephemera around the creative department — like this hammer with pompoms. It’s all of a piece.

Thanks to Marcus Oliver for bringing us in, and Sean Ferry for video.