WD_Black
Performance storage, purpose-built for gaming
Role:
Brand Design Lead
Brand Team:
Alejandro Chavetta
Shea Sjoberg
Neha Hattangdi
Sami Lovelady
ID Team:
Norio Fujikawa
Sean Missal
Sushant Vohra
Scott Pancioli
Oliver Henderson
Film Production:
Trizz
Work done at Astro Studios
Through a holistic design approach, we worked with Western Digital’s executive leadership and design teams to re-position, define the industrial design language, and craft a new brand for their premium performance drives for gaming. As the brand lead, I led the team in building the brand from strategy to guidelines. The result leverages the equity Western Digital already had in their premium product line, and pushes its evolution into the gaming space. Stepping away from typical gaming clichés, the identity system and design language reflects a utilitarian look and feel, taking inspiration from coding languages and precision tools.
We then re-engaged with their in-house team to help bring the brand to life, creating launch campaign concepts, messaging, photography/renders, and brand and product videos. I led the team through all stages of the process, providing design and creative direction to a team of graphic designers, motion designers, and a copywriter to deliver the packaging, website home and product pages, email templates, out of home advertising, banner ads, event spaces, product videos, social media assets, print ads, technical documents, and retail partner assets. Finally, I managed a studio collaboration with Trizz, a Barcelona-based VFX and film studio to bring the brand film to life. The outcome of this effort is a cohesive brand and family of products that’s uniquely differentiated and positioned to define a new category—performance storage for gaming.
Drive Your Game:
After the brand and ID guidelines were delivered, while product was being manufactured and packaging produced, we developed a brand launch campaign to announce the new family of products to the world. The final concept was built around "Drive Your Game", an idea that played on both the product type as well as it's transformation into an integral piece of gaming hardware—across both console and PC—that would live at the center of the gaming experience.