70 years of adidas - branding and creative direction
In 2019, adidas celebrated its 70th birthday and the opening of the new Arena building. My task was the development and implementation of a visual branding for a year-long communication campaign around the topic of workplace culture - which pinnacled in a big birthday party on the adidas campus (starring a ferris wheel - evidence here).
In the layout concept, the campaign is honoring the origin and DNA of the company by making the adidas founder the central piece. In the color concept, the past is represented by the Originals blue. It gets juxtaposed with the future: the new building, and yellow as the color of the connecting walkways on the new campus. The hand-painted brushstrokes add a notion of the creativity celebrated at the workplace.
employee activation
For the internal activation, my goal was to pay homage to the backbone of the company and to where it starts everyday - with the employees. It kicked off with a surprise poster campaign: the adidas campus was decorated with a collage of pictures and portraits paired with insider facts of our employees, products, new buildings and brand partners - but only half of the poster spots were filled, the other half stayed empty. Simultaneously, a “portrait collage” tool launched, which I created for employees to design their own 70 years of adidas visual digitally. Countless of the generated images were shared on the adidas intranet and ultimately projected back into physical space: they got printed and hung up to fill the remaining empty spaces on the poster walls in the adidas offices around the globe. The campaign was a prime example how to engage and empower humans through creativity. It built on the authenticity of the employees and their passion for adidas.
editorial
The 70 years of adidas branding expanded also on the external corporate communication channels, amongst others on the adidas company blog where I developed all visuals for a feature story about workplace culture: hand-painted headlines, photography, graphics, sourcing and selection of employee-generated content, special media formats such as a 360° click-through gallery: