This is a brand design collaboration between 'Air', a cloud-based digital asset platform for creators, and Richard Tully. This project focused on breaking the mold of flashy brand renewal, focusing on the essence, and creating 'Space to Breathe' through restrained design.
Tully’s team explored the direction by drawing hundreds of “A”s on various materials. The conclusion they reached was that “the best rebranding is the one that is barely rebranded.” They revisited Air’s original A logo and refined its shape a bit more. Whereas the A used to look like an S, it was reborn as a new A that reflected a human identity. The visual identity expressed the brand’s freedom and freshness by using the texture of the sky as a motif.
The brand’s new face is playful and introspective, with comedian Karim Rahma as “chief imagination officer” and a Dropbox-targeting performance. In fact, the first draft of the new A logo was reportedly a random doodle on the back of a boarding pass while flying over the Atlantic Ocean. It wasn’t intentional, but it felt inevitable, Turley says.
Air's brand guide is a whopping 254 pages long and covers strategy, typography, emotional gradients, cloud animations, and more. It shows a serious approach to brand strategy, but at the same time, it doesn't hide its wit in parodying this seriousness.
The 'Space to Breathe' campaign, which is the core of this rebranding, focuses on relieving the physical and psychological pressures that creative teams experience while working. It makes it clear that Air's mission is to solve the many work-related difficulties that take away creativity in busy creative environments. To this end, we collaborated with artists Paul Raffaele, Bobby Bertissi, and Ryan Mack to visually capture the real emotions of the creative community.
