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When Viewpoint Creative tackles a new brand, it starts its creative process by determining what it can do to make that brand “own-able.”
“Whether that [own-able element] is a visual device, a way we animate, or even a color or a shape or a font, we look at the mission statement and try to boil the brand down to what makes it different in the market,” said Ted Roberts, creative director of design at Viewpoint. “Then try to make something that visually complements that.”
For HBO, that own-able element has long been its premium content, a trait Viewpoint showcased in 2011 via a redesign for the network’s domestic channels that used clean, smoothly flowing text and graphics to push HBO’s programming front and center. In 2013, the network approached Viewpoint to redesign its European channels. The directive was the same as the first time, only more so, to “maintain some of the aspects of the US brand, but be daringly minimal,” said Roberts. “That was a challenge because the domestic rebrand we did was fairly minimal to begin with. How much can you take away without losing the identity?”
It turned out, quite a bit. Drawing inspiration from non-television brands offering premium products such as Jaguar and Tiffany’s, Roberts and the Viewpoint team distilled the HBO essence into the simplest graphical scheme imaginable, a single white line that moves with hypnotic fluidity across the screen, ushering in textual elements, the HBO logo and upcoming content. Though spare and rigid, Viewpoint added a warm, organic quality to the line by casting it in a gently colored aurora light that “creates something a little closer to human,” Roberts said, “a little more approachable.”
Adding to the design challenge posed by such extreme minimalism was an unusual technical challenge. Broadcast across 15 different countries, and 15 different languages, HBO Europe automates its content delivery to maintain brand consistency, meaning Viewpoint had to create a framework of elements that could be wrapped around whatever the network decided to put out, without human intervention. The same graphics that flowed beautifully with text in German had to flow beautifully with text in Hungarian, text in Czech, and so on.
“For the domestic brand we could give HBO a tool kit where they could then swap footage in Aftereffects and that would be part of the animation they would render up and so forth,” said Roberts. “We couldn’t do any of that with the European brand. Nobody was opening any sort of software to go in and change things. Our graphic elements had to work seamlessly where you could throw anything into them and we didn’t know what was going to get thrown into them ever. It was almost like working with blinders on in terms of the content. It had to be a one size fits all.”
In the end, of course, Viewpoint pulled it off, producing a redesign that is flexible without compromising a uniquely European aesthetic where “less is more,” said Roberts. “A lot of times in the US, more is more, but in Europe it’s really subtlety, simplicity, quiet. Things can take a little more time to develop. It seems like people for the most part have a little more patience over there.”
[Images courtesy of Viewpoint Creative]
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