Humanature

BRANDING A CULTURE BENT ON BENEVOLENT DISRUPTION.

As the Branding Development Director of a startup studio, Humanature, my first duty was to create the studio identity. One of the driving differentiators of the studio was it’s creative direction and the embrace of non-traditional visual styles for the games we were creating. The free-to-play publishing model limited bandwidth, but that in turn freed us up to embrace more interesting illustrative and graphic design-driven aesthetics, as opposed to chasing photorealism as was the case with pre-packaged console and PC developers. As a new brand we knew we had to stand out, and from a brand character standpoint we wanted to portray a subversive, immediate, passionate and endearing character. 

My creative partner in crime, Studio Art Director Geoff Coates, had a penchant for doodling the characters that would eventually become the studio mascots, but that wasn’t obvious from the start. We went through several iterations before we realized the answer was in front of us all along. These creative gremlins (who would later become known as Huna’s) embodied the spirit we wanted to portray, they were unique, gave us the flexibility for unprecedented customization and basically everyone loved them so we pitched this direction to the studio executives, and then the studio owners (Nexon America) and the rest of was history. This illustration branding model definitely took commitment to maintain, but the relevance to the studio team was unlike anything I’d see before. The “bombulb” icon was created for the Huna’s and it represented their single-minded goal of creating disruptive ideas, the logotype is it’s fuse. Along with a snarky copy tone we had a unique and memorable identity that stood out and attracted the kind of talent and partners we needed to be successful.

 (2007. Work created at Humanature. Awesome character work done by Geoff Coates.)