Each year Sony holds an event in Los Angeles to showcase their years film and tv content for sales to various platforms and markets. Normally this is done on the Sony Campus in Culver City. From 2020, the show and all the spectacle had to take place virtually, and this year 2021 they decided to rebrand the event, and asked for my help developing the logo and branding system which would work across the web and streamed virtual events.

The branding exercise was quite in depth, iterating hundreds of options for logos of various shows, as well as the full event itself. We explored composition and color, typography, photography and materiality.

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The Problem:
Sony is a huge company involved in so many diverse projects, even if you only look at the media part of the company. The brand for this event needed to fit with existing Sony design, but stand alone and speak to the special nature of this event. It also needed exist as a package that could contain many specific pieces of content, film and tv, a deep film archive… and not conflict with many properties with many different tones and moods.

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The Solution:
We decided that metaphor to use was one of transportation and immersion. Sony’s properties should envelope you in compelling worlds, impactful stories of all kinds.
What started with conversations about portals, and immersive worlds, eventually this became the idea of the Spotlight, and using color to wrap around the audience as we pull them through so many different narratives and moments of each show.
Some of the concept of Worlds did stay however, in the use of these massive ambiguous circles or globes used to frame the graphics for the event. Large and mysterious, and able to change scale feeling to fit so many ideas.

Logo Development

The show itself required naming and branding, as well as some of the individual properties. Both needed close consideration, as well as thinking through how any Event logo would interact with each specific Show or Film wordmark.

Here’s a slew of unused marks that I think are still pretty nice: