‘Deliver the culture.’ 02. Be Coherent. Think beyond brand guidelines.

So this is the second principle, really, of our plan for delivering the culture. I’m been reading Will Storr’s book on the science of storytelling. I’d really recommend you read it. It’s a really great book about how humans connect to stories. One of the key principles of that book is that humans create coherence. They create logic. They want things to make sense together, right? But they hate repetition. They’re bored easily by repetition. I think one of the reasons that I noticed Blup in the first place was this sense of constantly being visually playful, but also being able to connect things together in really clever ways. How do you manage that? So our idea was, look, how do we create art? Right?

How do we disrupt the way people are absorbing information but visually. And it was very, very important that we understood that our work spoke out to the audience. Whether it’s the colours, whether it’s the subjects, whether it’s a bit of typography that’s in it. Style guides are now sort of five dimensional, aren’t they? So you’ve got, the traditional thing a typeface, a set of colours. And creating a system out of those things. Some typography. Some language, some written language. But now you’ve got animation, you’ve got sound, you’ve got all of these different elements. And I think it’s a much bigger conjuring act, isn’t it?

I think where I first noticed just how delicately you’re able to balance all of these elements working together was the Chelsea kit launch. I wonder if you could just take us through that, because you created a system but it’s not obvious initially, you know? Yeah, so we were approached by Nike to launch the Chelsea kit. Which was the first time I think Nike actually got Chelsea as a kit maker. Here’s the players, this their story. How do you represent it with your visual finesse? So we took one of the players, say, David Luiz and his whole thing is about Brazil. So we took elements of Brazil, put them in together, and created a story within a story.

And you see all of sports magazines talking about it because the kit was beautiful. Obviously, Nike did an amazing job. But also it was the campaign that really stood out to people to make them want to share the campaign across all platforms. Yeah, but I think it’s interesting. Because I think if you searched that kit launch and you see all of the images together in a Google search, they hang together. There’s a language there. You know? And it’s not repetitive. It feels like you’ve sort of built out a set of principles almost.

So there’s almost like a framework that underpins each of those images that you can then drop all of those visual elements into – that provides the consistency, that provides the coherence, and that helps people connect it. There are a number of principles within digital media that you can hang your system off of. And animation is one of those. It could just be about the way something moves every time. One of the other projects that I thought was really interesting in this respect is the trainer remixes that you did. Because I think that what’s really amazing about that imagery is that is you can see all of these different images of, say– it might be the Air Max 270.

And every image is different but everything hangs together. Yeah, I mean that’s an ideal case study, right? I’m a massive sneakerhead. I love collecting sneakers. I’ve got hundreds. JD got in touch with us and they say, you know, we love what you did with the sneakers. This is the JD 270 and can you remix it? And we created this beautiful animation where it was like impactful, it’s, again, the flashing lights, it engaged the audience.

And it really did show that a passion project of mine could turn into a real life job to then actually eventually sell the sneakers in the end. Bringing the visual fire. I love that. [LAUGHS] The Blup way. The Blup way.