Case Study
Shock the System
When MTV.com approached us to come up with some outrageous graphical treatments for their newly developed HTML website, we quickly realized we needed to ask a fundamental question before desiging -- who is MTV? By understanding the brand and its ever-changing relation to pop-culture, we were able to devise a highly creative and relevant graphical approach to 'shock the system' and rejuvenate the online brand identity.
Analyze This
Diving back into our collective experiences of growing up with MTV, we reminisced on the channel's early interstitials and its liberal use of the logo. We realized that the essence of the MTV brand is transformation and discovery. Part of the youth of the brand was its ability to constantly find itself anew. Working with MTV creative director, Andy Titus, we began to envision the logo as a chameleonic character actor who could play many diverse roles.
Knowledge is Power
Armed with our new insight behind the malleable, mutable, and downright MASHABLE brand, we set out to reinvigorate the online image. Working under Andy’s direction, we developed the concept of multiple skins (dubbed 'HATS') that would display at random. We drew inspiration from the original MTV interstitials with each skin design featuring the MTV logo as a character in scene. The results were strangely surreal, fantastically poppy, and fully MTV.
A Successful Online Rebrand
The executions created such a buzz that MTV opened the HATS platform up as a world-wide contest, allowing anyone to submit their own designs. The result has yielded continuous and voluminous submissions by designers around the globe, and of course, a rich and varied user experience.