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Project overview
We did a complete brand refresh, spanning strategy, verbal identity, tone of voice and visual identity for Ludic. The new identity was then carried across the website, packaging, digital applications and advertising campaigns.
A strong brand system is an unfair advantage in advertising.
Every ad asks a brand a bunch of questions.
What would you say here? How would you sell this? What would you joke about? What would you never joke about? How loud can you be?
How much can the design change before it stops looking like you?
If the answers only exist in someone’s head, every new campaign starts with the same problem: Who are we again?
Your brand guidelines should do more than tell someone not to stretch the logo.
A useful brand system gives everyone making something for the brand a place to start.
It establishes the thinking behind the brand, the personality it carries, the way it speaks, the words it uses, the words it avoids, the way layouts come together and how all of those things work with each other.
Even something as simple as tone of voice needs more thought than three adjectives on a page.
“Playful. Bold. Confident.”
Great.
But what does playful actually sound like when you have a shoe to sell?
What does confident sound like when there is a sale?
What happens when you need a billboard, a product launch, an Instagram post or an email subject line?
A good verbal identity answers those questions with actual examples.
Write this.
Never write this.
Push the joke this far.
Sell the product like this.
The people working on your brand tomorrow should not have to guess what the people who built it yesterday were thinking.
AI can follow your tone of voice.
It should not have to invent it.
It is easier than ever to generate copy.
That makes knowing what you want to say even more important.
A bot can give you fifty headlines in a few seconds.
It still needs to know which one sounds like you.
That thinking has to come first.
The point of view, personality, language, rules and references that make one sentence feel right for your brand and another feel completely wrong.
Verbal identity is not the final layer you add once the logo is done.
It is part of the system.
When that system is built properly, advertising gets a lot more interesting.
Which brings us to Ludic.
Ludic came to us for a brand refresh.
The brand already existed.
Our job was to give everything around it a clearer system and a stronger point of view. We worked across strategy, personality, verbal identity, tone of voice and visual identity, refining the existing icon and building out the typography, colour, photography, layouts and applications that would eventually become the Ludic brand world.
Then we put it to work.
The brand system became the campaign brief.
When it was time to advertise Ludic, we did not have to invent an advertising personality for the brand.
We already knew how Ludic spoke.
We knew how much wordplay belonged in a headline.
We knew how the product could sit inside a layout.
We knew the kind of photography the brand owned.
We knew how playful it could get without turning into a joke.
So a pair of old school sneakers could become:
Old school kicks, new school tricks.
And a footwear ad could say:
Some think outside the box. Some just walk beyond it.
The ads were not a new creative direction sitting on top of the identity.
They came from it.
The verbal identity gave us the language. The visual identity gave us the world.
The brand system gave both enough structure to keep making new things without starting again every time.
