IBM Let's Create
Brand platform, 2022
Responsibilities
Art direction, branding, design system, idenity guidelines
Together at Ogilvy, we helped IBM launch a new global brand platform that lays the foundation for its next era. Let’s create is an open invitation to all the visionary creative minds—the developers, the technologists, the engineers, the IT leaders—to unleash their imaginations, do the unimaginable, and do it together.
The company’s most significant brand initiative in more than a decade, the new design system reflects the vision, strategy, and purpose of today’s IBM—an IBM that is focused on creativity, innovation, and collaboration to create long-lasting value for clients and partners while helping solve their most challenging business issues.
Derived from the IBM 8-bar logo, the node is an activating visual signature that drives the entire design system. It determines ratios and grids, can transform and propel, and direct and inform content. The node’s purpose is never decoration, but rather creates structure within compositions.
The design system resembles that of an open invitation. Whitespace dominates the layouts to create and fill your imagination with. Like a blank page, the idea is to keep the layout light and bright at its simplest form. The driving design of Let’s create is an initiative to join together, lead with a vision, and say it simply.
With IBM’s incredible amount of communication and offerings, the system needed to be flexible depending on the complexity of the message. When the message is simple, layouts can contain only typography with short and concise copy. When visuals are needed to support a narrative, layouts can include typography and photography or data visualizations at different scales and quantities.
Ogilvy 485, Chicago
Ogilvy New York
Creative Direction
Liz Taylor
Joe Sciarrotta
Jeff Curry
Design Direction
Gabe Usadel
Todd Simmons (IBM)
Design
Connor Fleming
Martin Pohlmann
Lucia Vaughan
Motion Design
Hornet
ManvsMachine
Gretel
IBM Blue Studio
Press
IBM Charts New Brand Direction With Campaign Built Around Creativity—adweek.com