Approached by Michele Salati at branding agency Ogilvy Hong Kong, Daniel Brokstad was tasked with creating a series of multidisciplinary type-based posters for the new WPP Campus – Foundry 852. The project eventually led him to fuse type with everything from illustration to 3D animation, AR to clay sculpting, and resulted in a mind-blowing series of posters, each with their own story to tell. Originally from Norway and educated in Australia, Daniel now lives in New York where he runs his own design studio, BROKSTAD.
“They wanted their new space to have decoration on meeting room walls, digital screens and posters in in hallways, to spark creative motivation for employees,” says Daniel. “The concept was to have each of them reflect a creative value of the space: a space to create, play, learn, grow, experiment, etc. Each of these were to be written in Chinese and English to reflect the multicultural working environment.”
The unique set of posters, some coming with additional AR or 3D layers, were intended to represent the different values of the space and the work culture they were cultivating. “We worked with vector, digital art, hand drawing, 3D animation, augmented reality and clay sculpting,” Daniel says. “This gave additional meaning to the designs themselves, as the technique was an extension of the value it was representing. For example, using clay when designing the ‘Space to Play’ poster made the design process itself playful.”
One of the posters, ‘Space to Grow,’ used 3D animation created by Edu Torres to allow the type to grow beyond the borders of the design. “This was further expanded by implementing augmented reality to make the letters expand/grow out of the poster when viewed through your phone,” Daniel explains. “For ‘Space to Collaborate,’ we made the Chinese letters in transparent glass above the design in English, making them work together as a design piece. This also mixed both flat vector design with 3D artwork, meaning it was a collaboration between different techniques as well as designers to put it to life. We kept this mentality with all of them, expressing their value through both the design and technique used to convey it.”
Exploring type in this way has resulted in a fascinating series of posters that shift and change before your eyes. For Daniel, the functional and expressive sides of type are not separate but part and parcel; “type can be a form of illustration to convey a message in an artistic or visual way, or even just something that creates room for pure experimentation and playing around,” he says. “The fact that type can be expressed in so many different ways is exactly what makes it so interesting. People pushing the boundaries of what type can be – how it can be written and read – helps to expand the perception of type and the possibilities it can deliver.”
Thank you so much to Daniel for sharing more with us! You can take a look over at BROKSTAD for more.
