“This Work Can’t Wait” IDEO Campaign & Identity Refresh
Creative Direction // Writing & Storytelling // Brand Strategy
IDEO began as an industrial design agency, and helped usher in the democratized era of “everyone is a designer.” By 2022, it was an open joke within the offices that it was difficult to describe what IDEO does. We designed… everything?
I researched IDEO’s 30+ year evolution for more than a month, and interrogated where “responsibility” fit into the firm’s oft-touted feasibility/viability/desirability framework. That research set me up to project lead and co-creative direct the largest marketing campaign and identity refresh IDEO had pursued in more than a decade.
“This Work Can’t Wait” involved 20+ of designers, highlighting more than a dozen recent examples of standout work. Over the course of nearly six months, I tried to push IDEO out of its historic comfort zones in a few meaningful ways:
Embracing (even celebrating) the imperfect. We “broke the grid” and injected a more messy, hand-sketched, work-in-progress feel to IDEO’s typical clean, structured visual identity. That clean, pixel-perfect representation of design feels disingenuous to me, and it certainly didn’t reflect the moment IDEO was in circa 2022. We needed to present a more honest, evolving organization.
Changing tense from the fully-completed past to an active, honest present. The word “impact” often acts like a photograph, depicting a stationary moment when design’s work is done. And IDEO often found itself waiting for months or years after a project before it could find the language to describe that fully set scene of impact. This not only felt out of sync with the ever-unfolding consequences (intended and unintended) of design, but it existentially challenged IDEO whenever the agency tried to talk about recent or current work. Linguistically, we leaned heavily into present-tense, gerund-rich sentences. The “-ing” language made the campaign more dynamic and allows IDEO to keep the conversation going as work continues to evolve and change.
Putting the picture in motion. By using video, animation, and dynamic elements in the user interface, we depicted a tangible representation of IDEO’s present state of flux. The language, the projects, the entire campaign felt like a picture coming into focus. Motion helped all those pieces move toward one another, and gave IDEO more permission to be humble, honest, and in tune with the transformation it espoused as being important to all organizations.
The campaign took over IDEO’s homepage for more than a year and extended out to every touchpoint of IDEO’s brand. It generated a measurable uptick in site engagement and sales leads. Various senior leaders within the company called it “a huge success.” (Check it out here.)
