Sonos Sound Is
We worked with Sonos to explore what 'Sound Is'.
Setting a new direction. Earlier this year, we worked with Sonos' brand design team to create a new communications strategy for their @sonos Instagram account. We helped them reposition the channel as a place for people focused stories within the world of sound, without feeling too removed from the master brand. This process included an internal audit, updating their visual principles, developing a warmer tone-of-voice, and identifying a selection of audience profiles.
Sound Is... more than music. Once this strategy was in place, we worked with Sonos and came up with a new content series, 'Sound Is'. For Sonos, sound is more than just music. It’s also podcasts, home theatre, radio, the city and nature. Sound can evoke a mood, change your whole day, make you dance, wake you up or send you to sleep. So we asked artists from around the world to visually describe what sound means to them.
We curated the series with four artists, each working in a different discipline, city and with their own perspectives on what ‘Sound Is’ to them. We kept the brief open as we wanted to see how each artist would respond artistically.
For Lunga Ntila, sound is the passing on of legacy. First up in the series was Lunga Ntila of Pretoria, South Africa. Lunga expressed how sound is a way of handing down a legacy across generations. She tells us that the shapes of the cut outs in her collaged response play homage to leopards, which is one of the ‘Ngconde’ clan totems.
For Merijn Hos, sound is balance. Merijn Hos is a visual artist from Utrecht with an indefineable, always changing style. He responded with a series of four visceral responses to different sound stimuli. He created the artworks as a response to music, in the same intuitive approach he uses when designing album artwork.
For Wang & Söderström, sound is a chain reaction. Copenhagen based design duo Wang & Söderström said that sound follows them throughout the day. For this reason, they played with the concept that sound is a chain reaction that builds up over time, like a sheet of music. They built sound design and animation into their final piece.
To Sujin Lee, sound is a landscape. South Korean artist Sujin Lee used to be a sound designer, so we were excited to explore what sound means to someone who has such a close relationship with it. In her landscape that she created, she wants you to look into your subconscious to apply your own sounds to the image.
4 cities, 4 photographers. We paired each artist with a photographer based in their city. We guided our photographers to approach the photoshoot in their own distinctive style, with a human touch and focusing on off the cuff moments.
A fresh take on Sonos' look and feel. We built a logo lockup for the series that plays on the existing sound visualisation Sonos use across their brand, but with a fresh touch. The colour palette took reference from the existing brand palette, but with added vibrancy and brightness to sit cohesively alongside our commissioned artworks.
Telling human stories. By starting Sonos’ human storytelling journey with Sound Is, we created social content that doesn't rely on Sonos product being the centrepiece. By celebrating these artists, their disciplines and their stories, we produced a holistic content series of interviews, studio photography, and blog posts that had an overwhelmingly positive response online.
