Influence Infinitum – Mark Stokoe Creative

Viral Nation Brand Refresh

Concept Dev / Creative Direction / Brand Strategy / Project Mgmt / Design

Created with the Viral Nation Executive and Corporate Marketing teams.

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Creative Direction: Mark André Stokoe | Copywriting: Viral Nation Corporate Marketing | Animation: Good Bad Habits

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Color Revamp // Photography // Logo Animation // Graphic Devices // Brand Collateral // Brand Guidelines // Concept Development

The only constant in life (and branding) is change. Virtually every brand will go through evolutions and sometimes revolutions over it's lifespan. In the case of Viral Nation, a fast-paced and rapidly expanding business, they had made a number of revisions to their visual identity in a short period of time. As such, in order to maintain some brand consistency, this refresh focused on refining some of the existing elements, revamping the visual language, but preserving the logo created during their rebranding the previous year.

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Color Revamp

Color is critical for expressing a brand's identity, and applying it cleanly and consistently is key to achieving audience recognition. Having already gone through a number of recent evolutions, one of our main goals was to streamline the color set without fully abandoning what had been done for previous iterations.

The brand colors originally consisted only of black and white, then (after a couple short-lived brand updates) a somewhat excessive neon-inspired palette, and this presented a unique challenge in developing the new brand colors. Slide to see the before and after below.

In the end we decided to keep true to their original focus on black and white as core brand colors, and retain some of the neon palette's vibrancy, albeit with some tweaks to the values. This allowed us to keep a focus on the visuals of the brands and creators that Viral Nation represents, but still have something in our crayon box for when imagery isn't sufficient on its own.

Photography

When shooting owned photos of Viral Nation's talent, an eclectic and vibrant group of creators, the portraits used to depict them should strive to capture their distinct personality and charisma. These shoots should be directed to draw out their unique character and rely on minimal props and set dressing.

Our preferred style for owned-photography is a mix of monochrome and low-saturation images to provide a dramatic visual style. Shots should have a relatively high key and deep shadows for standalone staged images, and medium-key for shots intended to be used as isolated cut-outs.

Critically, all shoots should aim to create vibrant and expressive images that are reflective of the creators and their content.

Viral Nation's talent covers a huge range of categories with diverse styles and personalities. In order to build in some consistency for when they appear in VN's marketing material, we settled on three brand-approved approaches to showcasing talent.

In a surprising twist, many influencers and creators lack high-quality images of themselves, leading to the "Cut-Out" approach often needing to be used to work around low-res images or video stills with messy backgrounds.

While not every talent represented by Viral Nation had exceptional images, many of the higher profile creators did have great shots from professional photographers that did an exceptional job of showcasing their vibrant personalities. Whenever the opportunity arose, we developed the visual brand to be able to showcase these shots.

A common need VN had was to feature a variety of talent in a single piece of collateral, or feature individual creators using less than optimal source images. with that in mind, the "cut-out" approach gave us flexibility to blend together widely varying photo styles, and take some focus away from low-res or poor-quality images.

The "off-register" style was a later addition to the brand toolkit, included as a way to draw focus to the talent while also reinforcing the connection to the visual brand through color. The other benefit was to have a bit more variability in the brand look in order to avoid relying too heavily upon the simpler geometric graphic devices.

In addition to being a talent agency, VN is also a marketing agency, and as such, sometimes the messaging they take to market is a bit more abstract. With that in mind, we needed to develop some appraoches for branding stock imagery.

In addition to being a talent agency and a marketing agency, VN is also a software company. They keep very busy over there. Between trhat, and the fact that so many of their talent is focused on social platforms, we also needed styling for in-device imagery.

Logo Animation

Good Bad Habits created a short and sweet logo animiation using the new brand palette. Given how minimal we want the Viral Nation branding to be in most instances, the aim was to keep it as simple and quick as possible, while still having some dynamic character.

With their heavy focus on marketing through social, we also redesigned their weekly influencer/social content spotlight titles and animation.

The Digital Creator Guide was another series that VN was launching around the time of the rebrand. A series of courses were shot by high-profile influencers to educate entry, mid, and high-level users to various platforms.

This project presented an interesting challenge, as all the content had been shot prior to the rebrand, and we had no static images of the presenters to work with for thumbnails and promotional content.