Razorfish WORKING THE GLOBAL VISUAL LANGUAGE

Razorfish is a leading provider of digital media content with offices all over the world. For them, the global visual language is very pertinent. I have had the pleasure to enjoy a long relationship with this company, so when they approached us with the request to help them with some early concepts for their corporate presentation, we were only too happy to help. With offices in Amsterdam, Boston, Hamburg, Helsinki, London, Los Angeles, Mannheim, New York, Oslo, San Francisco, and Stockholm, they can't really rely on big blocks of English text to communicate their message quickly across the board.

One key message for Razorfish is "Everything that can be digital, will be." This is a very complex message, not easily communicated without text. Our solution was to create a series of iconographic symbols: the house, the man, the camera, the hand, the computer, the phone. We then meshed these elements with a motion symbol we developed that served to represent "digital change." The change symbol spins and ”with its motion ”converts the eye icon into a camera, the camera into a computer, the computer into a handheld, and so forth.

When we showed the spot to our friends at Razorfish NY, the project manager had one key suggestion: Start the spot at a relatively slow pace and, progressively, speed it up. His reasoning was that the experience of culture in general, and his company in particular, is that digitization is growing at an exponential rate. What I thought was particularly striking about this was that his comment was pure communication through motion. Think about it he saw the spot and added to its power to communicate, not through text, but purely through motion. The speeding up of the animation added a huge conceptual dimension to the spot. So, not only did our spot convey the message that "Everything that can be digital, will be," but it also communicated the exponential nature of this concept. This is a very simple, but very cool, example of the power of motion graphics to further amplify concepts and thoughts to enrich them further.

This spot met all four points of our process: It uses a global visual language (universal symbology and motion), respects the technical environment (12k), considers multitasking attention deficit (10 seconds), and focuses on change exponential change as its emotional center.