Projects: Starz

Reid Thompson: Our projects are getting bigger and bigger and the last year's Starz project is a good example of how we are using, besides just our designs skills, we are working with companies to establish their brand identities really through the strategy, working with the changing strategies of the company, and Starz was a yearlong project almost, that when we started out, it really was about coming up with this sort of brand themes and the idea was that Starz sort of was a delivery network for movies, and we wanted to make it much more of an emotional brand and connect with the audience and all those feelings that you get from a movie, we wanted people do attach to the Starz brand. What we do differently than just writing things up in a doc is we think about things visually. So early on, Heather and I worked on different mood-boards and conceptual mood-boards that helped to really focus on the process and to get to something more concrete pretty quickly. We've focus grouped them and it was funny. We had some things that were kind of specific about movies, and there were other things that were more about the fan of a movie and then this one direction was very emotional and it actually didn't have a lot of concrete things into it. It was light and beauty and kind of mystery and people related much more to that when they didn't know what they were looking at, and it was kind of fun. Like, oh! Yeah, I don't know what that is, but I like it. It feels good and I think sort of -- making people feel something and relate to your brand on a kind of emotional level. We knew that was kind of right direction to take. So that was sort of the first six months of the project and then once we established this direction and look, it was really based on a new logo that they were establishing and we worked with Starz and another design agency to just kind of refocus the logo and actually embed the Starz light into the logo. So there is new Starz logo that's much simpler to use in a lot of different mediums. The light is built into the logo. So that light theme and the emotion of kind of movie light, and what light, the beauty that light brings to everyday became our theme. That was probably last year around this time that we started trying the theme and playing it in a lot of different ways. Heather and I-- kind of light's kind of amorphous. There is not a lot of graphic framework there. So we tried to make it unique. Heather Kim: Yeah. How to make light as a graphic motif because basically when you are making a package, you can't make it about just light because light is not necessarily unique or own-able by one package. So we came up with kind of hexagons and these graphic motifs that represented forms of light, that you would see hexagons and lens flares and rays of light and stuff like that, and arrays of dots or kind of swooshes of arcs and try to include a lot of that. Reid Thompson: And establish- and sort of establish the uniqueness of the Starz light. So it was about natural light, it wasn't manufactured, and so it was Reid Thompson: looking to the sun, flares.. Heather Kim: Not a synthetic light. Reid Thompson: And a complex mix, so that it was really beautiful. Heather Kim: But it was all based of this writing that we had done and you had a word like shine which was basically the guiding light of everything. Reid Thompson: The word shine just, it was inspirational. It was this idea of this beauty of life that is an important part, so in that regard it's been a success. I think the logo is a big success because it's much easier to use, you just need one element for it, and yeah, it's alive. (Music plays.)