Case Study
Brand Identity
ARCADE
A project creating brand guidelines and creative mockups for a fictitious clothing company focused on an 80’s and 90’s arcade culture aesthetic.
Tools
Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Generative AI
Project Description
Design Challenge
To design brand guidelines, visuals, and digital and physical materials for a fictitious company. The brand identity should demonstrate consistency across all mediums and communications so that the brand is easily identifiable and quickly conveys the messaging, tone, and aesthetic of the company’s image.
Background
Arcade is a streetwear apparel brand inspired by the 8-bit world of 80’s & 90’s arcades, retro gaming culture, and warm nostalgia. It combines pixelated textures and visuals and a bold color palette with modern streetwear designs. The vibe is fun, playful, and clean.
Logo
Brand Identity
Logo
The brand logo aims to succinctly set the tone for the company’s aesthetic and culture with the viewer’s first exposure. The use of pixelated letterforms and a warm-to-cool sunset style palette reflects classic video game and arcade styles, quickly communicating the brand’s identity.
“ARCADE” was written in the TINY5 typeface which was then pixelated into vectorized boxes. Each letter was filled with brand colors and then individual pixels were pulled away as an homage to retro 8-bit graphics.
The logo should be presented on top of one of the brand background colors of charcoal or cream.
Brand Colors
The color palette was crafted to inspire a warm nostalgia that is both comforting and suggestive of youthful freedom and identity.
Brand Color Palette
Brand Typefaces
Tiny5 is the typeface that forms the structure of the brand logo, but is also often used for other marketing and branding headers. Its heavy pixelated form harmonizes well with the brand culture and aesthetic.
ITC Avant Garde Gothic Pro provides a strong contrast to Tiny5 while also reflecting the forms of the same era and scene to maintain consistency with the the visual language. It is easy to read and offers many font variations for flexible type design and usage.
TINY5 is only used for headers and is never used for body text due to its form being a challenge to read over lengthy measures of text. It should always be written in all caps and have tracking set to 50 for readability.
ITC Avant Garde Gothic Pro is the only typeface to be used for body text. It offers a nice contrast to the chunkiness of TINY5.
Retail Exterior
Storefront
The brand colors of cream, charcoal, and orange are painted on the store front. Signage includes the logo on a charcoal background popped out using raised lettering. “PLAY BOLD. DRESS BOLD.” is in ITC Avant Garde Gothic Pro, all caps, and in the cream brand color. It has tracking set to 50 and is also in raised lettering.
Storefront
Window Display
Instead of a standard street window display of advertised fashions, the window instead features a simple touch screen game. This is a curb side attraction to both draw interest to the location and to promote the brand identity and culture. It sets the tone for the vibe of the store as well as being a feature worthy of visiting in an era where brick & mortar locations often struggle to compete with the digital space.
The games are proprietary to Arcade. They mimic retro 8-bit games and have very simple touchscreen controls, analogous to smartphone games. The customer has the choice of a few different games. The games are also displayed on an interior store screen as they are being played so shopping customers are able to see the game being played.
Touch screen game on display window
Touch screen game menu on display window
Clothing Box Packaging
Packaging
Clothing Box
The clothing box is another space in which the brand’s identity can be carried through to the customer, making the purchase not only about the product, but the experience of purchasing and taking the product home. The clothing box becomes an item worth having in itself, not just a conveyance medium for the product.
It’s designed to mimic a retro arcade machine, with a “YOU LEVELED UP!” graphic revealed inside after the customer removes the clothing. The screen of the arcade machine on the box is clear plastic and shows the apparel inside, with a relevant graphic folded to show through the screen if present.
The box material is thick, giving it weight and integrity. It has a tactile, matte finish and sliding out the box to reveal your purchase becomes an experience. The packaging is fun to have and not just something to be tossed as soon as the customer gets home.
Vector Icons
Brand Character: Style
“Style” is a brand character created to mimic the 8-bit era of gaming design. They represent the brand through the appeal of retro gaming nostalgia and through a representation of fashion, both pillars of the brand’s identity.
Brand Character: Style
Brand Graphics
Brand Icons
A series of vectorized icons were created that can be used across a spectrum of physical and digital mediums. The function is to meld the pixelated design aesthetic and brand colors with fashion iconography to have usable graphics in whatever space they may be needed.
Creative materials below show in-store and digital usage.
Interior Brand Icon Signage
Retail Interior
Icon Signs
Instead of using standard written signs showing the location of different departments or sections, brand icons are hung above the applicable shopping sections. Using brand icons in store as signage and decor maintains brand identity in the real space of a brick and mortar interior, and not just on marketing or digital materials. This way the customer is always in the experience of shopping with Arcade. The product becomes the experience as much as the physical purchasable item.
The homepage opens with a minimal design with a simple interactive element: a button mimicking the coin slot on classic arcade machines. When the mouse hovers over the button, the cursor turns into a coin ready to be inserted and the coin slot enlarges slightly to emphasize it is interactable. When the user presses the button, the coin slides into the coin slot and a short video begins.
The coin slot disappears. A quick 2-3 second animation begins as the brand character Style falls down from the top to land in frame and stands there with a slight bouncing idle animation. “STYLE” pops up beneath him. 8-bit sound effects accompany his landing and the appearance of his name.
“VS” appears in the middle with similar 8-bit sound effects.
Finally, the villain, “Basic Fit” falls down with the same animation style and sound effects but accompanied by a musical stinger signifying he’s the bad guy. His idle animation is him pointing and laughing at the hero.
A short animation of the game simulation begins where Basic Fit jumps, laughs, and throws briefcases at the hero. Style jumps onto the briefcases turning them into the brand icons of fashion apparel.
Once he’s jumped on 6, collecting all the icons that are lining up at the top, Basic Fit is defeated. The villain shakes in rage before exploding into brand colored pixels.
The video ends with a CTA. Style bounces in his idle animation on the side where Basic Fit used to be and the icons he collected expand into buttons across the screen. The buttons each correspond to the associated apparel department. A “FIND YOUR FIT” button is also there that links to the main store hub page.
All of this can be bypassed by the user simply scrolling down to other content where there are further CTAs to begin shopping, or by using the navigation menu at the top.
Website
Website Homepage
Brand identity is maintained on the website by continuing to follow the brand guidelines of tone, colors, typography, and visual language. While photography and standard retail web design functionality is used throughout, the warm nostalgic feeling for 80’s-90’s retro gaming is always present.
The homepage opens with an interactive element that plays a short video ending in a CTA to shop. The video can be bypassed by scrolling down or clicking on the menu icon in the navigation bar so the user is never ‘trapped’ into waiting through the video. It is an aesthetic accessory to drive the uniqueness and identity of the brand, not a barrier to the products. It cultivates the goal that shopping at Arcade is an experience that is in itself exciting and nostalgic.
UI elements in the navigation bar and elsewhere on the site are designed with the same pixelated visual language of other brand elements.