When I first joined the company, 21CF had little more than a logo and basic color palette.
In 2016 we engaged Gretel NY to work on articulating the company culture and ethos, and create a new brand identity to align our diverse suite of brands and businesses under a single idea.
Storytelling is at the heart of 21CF. We took inspiration from the iconic searchlights of the logo itself. Our design uses the beams to frame imagery, create negative space, and highlight key text. The lights reveal, illuminate, and expose the stories, people and characters behind shows, films and teams around the world.
The result is an identity that expresses the 21CF brand through the content, writing, and artifacts of the stories themselves.
Beacons behavior with words only
Beacons behavior with content
Logo animation
Mask from American Horror Story
By the end of 2017, we had completed a massive brand identity which we extended into a physical space, the new 21st Century Fox headquarters in New York. During this extensive project, I had the opportunity to manage the myriad of agencies and people involved.
We created a series of 43 unique wall murals that each represent a brand and its story through the 21CF the lens. We named all the conference rooms after iconic characters to correspond with the murals inside.
In 6 months, we gathered hundreds of company artifacts, spanning 80 years of storytelling in cinema, broadcast, and sports, to be housed in a massive custom-designed modular display gallery and across the 3 executive floors.
The gallery wall is the central focal point of the 40,000 sf executive floor.
The project was recently recognized with a NYCxDesign Gold Award in the Creative Office category.
GO DEEPER: DISCOVERY & FINDINGS
During the research process, we reviewed the history of the company and identified milestones. Starting from the story of our founder Rupert Murdoch, we touched on the 1985 acquisition of the Fox Movie Studio, the launch of the FOX network in 1994, the international expansion in India with the conglomerate Star India, the launch of FX in 1996, and the acquisition of the National Geographic Society and what that meant for the company.
At 21CF we talked to the CEO and several stakeholders about the past, present and future of the company and its businesses.
Above: some priceless artifacts, storyboards, and costumes we found during our 6 months research around the globe.
GO DEEPER: DEVELOPMENT & EXECUTION
The discovery process helped us put together every piece of the puzzle (brand personality and attitude) and created clarity across our portfolio of brands. We articulated the brand personality and voice through a manifesto script. We defined the brand attributes and cultural threads that connected the different arms of the company. And finally, we created a flexible visual identity system to build upon.
The 21CF beams cut to the core, refract, reveal what lies beneath the surface, the component parts, the people, the process, and the stories behind every story we tell.
