Logo Design and ‘Media Delay’ in VR/The Metaverse
Visual identity takes on new dimensions for VR and the impending Metaverse
Let’s look ahead a bit. Not in a long-tail futurist kind of way, but in a right-around-the-corner kind of way. As designers responsible for visual identities, our work now lives in VR, whether we know it (like it) or not. Brand managers on the client side — your brand, and its visual identity system, are now present in 3D virtual spaces. We all talk a lot about touchpoints — VR is the next big arena for connecting with customers, and most brands are going in blind. They’ve literally never put on a headset.
Let’s look ahead a bit. Not in a long-tail futurist kind of way, but in a right-around-the-corner kind of way. As designers responsible for visual identities, our work now lives in VR, whether we know it (like it) or not. Brand managers on the client side — your brand, and its visual identity system, are now present in 3D virtual spaces. We all talk a lot about touchpoints — VR is the next big arena for connecting with customers, and most brands are going in blind. They’ve literally never put on a headset.
VR is approaching a mass adoption tipping point, mostly thanks to Oculus (Meta), and its PR machine and ad budgets. Google, Sony, Samsung are also grabbing huge market share through headsets and gaming platform plays. This is where the world is headed, because this is where consumer tech is headed, and we’re ready for the next big thing. Usage numbers are growing, and are already compelling at about 60M Americans using VR monthly. More importantly, 80% of consumers report feeling positive about experiencing branded VR tactics. They’ve bought the hardware, and they’re excited to see what progressive brands are going to deliver.
So if we’re smart, and looking ahead just a bit, we should all be recognizing the need to engage with this new medium as designers and brand leaders. We all want to be out in front, right? We all NEED to be out in front, in order to stay relevant and competitive.
Today
Right now, it’s likely that your brand is being experienced in woefully flat 2D in pancaked presentations in VR environments. On VR web browsers and video players at the very least — your flat logo, graphics, web pages are demoted to flat surfaces within amazingly rich 3D worlds. This is the latest example of the medium moving faster than our design systems — and we’re in that awkward phase where our 2D brands are suddenly asked to serve us well in a 3D environment they weren’t designed for. And they’re likely to fail for a while until brands, and designers, start crafting identities to thrive in 3D, with all that the medium offers. Lots more on that below.
This “medium delay” is fascinating though — and worth a quick fly over. Every time a new medium has hit the mainstream, brands have dragged on catching up with how their brand assets are presented. Not just the logo, although that part is my favorite — but even the content itself. A few examples of what I mean:
When TV exploded in the 50s, producers and directors were stuck in the live-audience mindset. They put actual audiences in front of the ’stage’ and shot programming from the live audience’s vantage point, trying to simulate the theater/stage experience. Laugh tracks were meant to replicate the live performance experience for viewers at home. Because that’s what directors knew — actors act for an audience in a theater, and the reaction of the audience is a key part of the show. It took decades for camera angles to get more interesting and dynamic (shooting outside on location must have blown minds) — and laugh tracks still haven’t fully died out. The film making craft completely changed how audiences consume content, and it took a long time for the old habits to give way to new creativity.
Bringing it back to logos and brand identities, with TV advertising, the initial instinct was to put a static logo on the end card — because art directors made billboards and newspaper ads, where logos were always and only ever static. That’s just what logos were — static artifacts. Over time, with the opportunities of the new medium, creativity took hold and we got audio branding (jingles), and eventually animated 2D logos to make that end card a bit more interesting and memorable. These days, a logo end card on a TV spot that isn’t animated feels either unresolved, or like it’s going for retro. The logo can be so much more with the addition of new dimensions — in this case, an animation timeline and inclusion of audio.
Some film studios got innovative early on, embracing their “motion-picture” medium and pushing boundaries. The MGM lion comes to mind — graphics mixed with live footage and audio. For the first time, the brand identity was primarily a film asset, and it was never meant to exist purely as ink on paper. This type of innovation represents the first attempts to create a brand experience that’s inherent to the medium, instead of transposed onto the new medium using old tricks and frameworks. This awakening is coming in 3D/VR for brands and visual identities, but it’s not quite here yet.
Last example — Web ‘pages’ — in the internet early days, they were just digital recreations of print projects. “Brochure sites”. Our only frame of reference as designers was the printed page. So we made digital versions of printed pages, with just the beginnings of interactivity through clickable links (a brand new concept at the time). More recently, websites are starting to play with a bit of interactivity on the header logos, which had stayed mostly static for 20 years (the Mailchimp logo hover state comes to mind) — so now logos can be interactive, for a bit of fun/delight. They could have been 15 years ago as well, and maybe a few were, but the vast majority of websites have and still do just slap a static logo in the upper left. Why? Because logos are static, and we haven’t been trying hard enough.
Medium Delay in VR
This is what’s happening now with visual identities and the VR medium. All of us 2D designers are slapping flat graphics into rich 3D spaces, because (for now), that’s all we know how to do. It’s a poster on a virtual wall, a flat and static PNG floating in a 3D lobby — an ultimately unimpressive touch point considering the possibilities we now have at our fingertips. Maybe it’s animated, maybe it has sound (we’re all pretty savvy with video and animation)… but most likely, it’s flat.
Of course, the medium is still growing up. 30 years after Lawnmower Man [1992], we’re still figuring out what 3D experiences will be for casual browsers, shoppers, gamers hopping between games in a Metaverse environment. There will be a next generation ‘web’ browsing experience, where brands build 3D spaces that can and will supplant their 2D (soon to be considered old-school) regular old websites. They’ll start as pancaked flat experiences in 3D spaces, but they’ll evolve quickly into truly 3D immersion.
So for now, we’re in the depths of Medium Delay in VR and 3D experiences. What will brand identities be, how will we craft them for new dimensions, and how will they be viewed/engaged-with once we catch up as designers and brands?
New creative territory
If we fast forward past the Media Delay in visual identity for VR/3D spaces, what will that new creative landscape look like for brands and brand designers? I see ‘logo design’ and ‘digital experience design’ on a collision course — we get to shape how the creation of interactive logos unfolds, which is very cool. The actual VR experience landscape is really fragmented at the moment (not like the mostly homogenized web browsing experience on a laptop), but there are some fundamental scenarios that we’ll be designing for:
Community VR Spaces
This is where your brand exists within someone else’s virtual space or world. You don’t control the full environment, but you can control how your logo shows up, and how users can engage with hit.
Owned VR Spaces
Worlds (apps) created by brands, full immersive control, and in theory, users who are there have already decided to engage with your brand through an app download or on some other platform that you have created. These experiences can be full-fidelity, and wonderfully rich, but in general, you’re providing VR experiences to people who are already fans and customers.
VR ‘Websites’
I see the day coming where as much (or probably a lot more) effort is put into a brand’s main ‘site’ in VR/3D than we currently see for 2D websites built for desktop and mobile. I don’t know what VR browsers will look like, or how the Metaverse-ification of VR will bring structure to open web browsing of 3D sites (worlds) within the headset… but this is where brands will compete for engagement on the open web. If your ideal customer hops into VR and can go browse for companies like they do now on their 2D browsers, you need to be ready with a custom VR experience, fully branded and engaging, and crafted for the 3D medium. It’ll be rooms and experiences, rather than flat walls of text and images with a header navigation of buttons to swap you over to other flat walls of text and images. For sure, there’ll be an address bar equivalent though — so if your VR site isn’t capturing their interest, they’ll be off to the next.
Who’s going to build the first VR-dedicated corporate website — and make it their primary website? I want to work on those projects. Opportunities to design the consumption of information and engagement with content in 3D, entirely new UX models, and the dimensional architecture of ‘website’ content for VR sound fascinating.
Logos of the future are 3D-native and interactive
Within VR, people can walk around your logo, they can interact with your logo — your logo can play videos, make sounds, it can change size and location within an environment, it can age, evolve, transform, cycle through stages, it can morph based on external data… Maybe there’s something cool behind it? Inside it? Maybe it’s holographic light and devoid of physical structure? Maybe people can grab it and play catch with it across your lobby? Does it ‘go off’ like fountain displays on a timer? Can you collect it and take it with you? Can I publish this in early 2022 without a mention of NFTs? There, I mentioned them.
In VR, logos can be physically 3D, viewable from 360º perspectives (and you don’t necessarily control the viewing angle someone chooses). With the ability to have sound, animation, change of scale, position movement in space, infinite possibles for creative interactivity, change over time, dynamic variations based on lighting in the VR space, or the weather outside, or temperature, or number of ‘visitors’ on your VR site/experience. What happens when you jump up and high-five the floating 3D Nike swoosh? Anything can happen, that’s what.
So the possibilities are exciting and endless. All of our dimensions — 3D physical dimensions, 4th dimension of time, and even 5th dimension (feels like magic to our 3–4 dimensional brains) can now be designed for brands in the VR environment. Damn this sounds like fun.
We have a mandate to embrace the full capabilities of the medium, rather than just slapping a 2D PNG logo in a fixed position on a flat plane in VR during a splash screen. This is what designers are doing right now, because this is how we’ve always used logos. Pick a spot in a 2D composition, put the logo there, done. In the fixed 3D real world, dimensional signage sits at the entryway to retail, pointed outward. Sometimes there are lights inside, sometimes they even spin, but compared to what we can do in VR, those tricks already feel ancient.
The brand book needs a new chapter
Back to the discipline of brand creation, for an increasingly pure-digital marketing and customer engagement landscape… we have to remember that technological whiz-bang only moves the needle if it’s tied to strategy. Now that we *can do all of these amazing things with a logo and brand design system, how can we make sure the technology doesn’t overwhelm strategy? We need to design guidelines, and define what those guidelines should be, for logos in 3D space. The brand book needs a new chapter.
Just because the logo can transform into a [whatever] when you spin it in 3D space, doesn’t mean it should. Interactions, state-changes, sounds, moving surfaces, effects — should all be defined, and tied to strategy. Each new dimension to your logo should have a reason for existing — beyond ‘this is so cool, check out what we can do!’.
VR logo interactions could become as much a part of your visual identity as the typeface you specify. But if it did [something else] instead, that’d feel disjointed and random. Fun, maybe, but it’s not supporting the overall significance of who you are as a company. Amazing experiences that reinforce the brand essence — that’s where we need to be focused.
We could start defining VR interactions for the logo that allow for future creativity — but within a conceptual framework that keeps those creative executions on brand. The VR logo can behave like XYZ, but never ABC. It can vanish and reappear, but it should never have a texture change. It’s resting state is this, but it’s allowed to do that.
Old school — “don’t stretch or skew the logo lockup”
VR equivalent — “don’t alter the lighting reflection physics or ambient soundtrack of the VR logo”
Designing our approach to identity systems for VR
Currently, we start with the highest fidelity in 2D design, and then work back to simpler versions. With this new medium coming into its own, should we start thinking about VR (animated/3D/interactive) first, then work back to the 2D animated versions, then back further to static/print and other nearly obsolete formats?
Or do our 2D vector-design brains still need to start with the flat version of a logo? Then simplify back, and expand forward to more elaborate VR versions? I don’t think designers working today are wired (or have been trained) to think about 3D as the first proving ground for a logo. Maybe that shift is coming though? In the meantime, we may need to reach out to 3D artists, sculptors, CAD/product designers to start unlocking the full potential of logos and brand expression within VR environments.
The dream team would include a brand designer (graphic design), a 3D modeling designer, animators, rendering/surface experts, sound designers, and video/motion graphics specialists. Collaborative 3D/virtual/interactive sculpture — that’s what we’ll be making.
As always with new tech-driven cultural phenomena, the technology side of the equation holds a lot of power. VR developers are going to be very busy for for the foreseeable future. Shoot me a note if you’re working on these types of next-generation projects, or if you want to share thoughts on how this new creative landscape can be shaped by designers, technologists and their clients. It’s right here in front of us, waiting for new thinking and fresh voices.
