Heart builds a brand from fiction for Drifters’ dual-world identity

Most brands start with a product, then build a story around it. Heart and Drifters did the opposite. They started with a fictional universe 200 years in the future, where civilisation has collapsed into icy chaos and survivors live in underground Silos, their lives controlled by The Paradigm Entertainment Group – a ‘Big Brother’ media empire that maintains order through constant entertainment. The Drifters are the rebels who escape this suppression, translating their DNA into unique digital avatars within a metaverse of endless possibilities. Only then did they figure out how to make it real. The project centres on a collection of rigged, customisable 3D avatars designed for movement across digital spaces. But founder Josie Bellini wanted more than just character creation tools. She wanted a brand world that could hold two opposing realities at once: the dystopian control the Drifters flee from, and the vibrant, expressive freedom they discover. Heart, the brand and creative agency led by siblings Asher Pilbrow and Brya Taylor, had to design a visual system that could argue with itself. “We really wanted to do the storytelling justice,” the Co-founders explain. “We thought about it like designing for film, trying to take the written story and turn it into a visual experience, like adapting a book for the screen. The system had to become a visual representation of the world they’d already created and people already come to love.” The design approach borrows tension from layered fictional worlds – the retro-futurism of Blade Runner, the moral ambiguity of Fallout, the brutal beauty of The Last of Us. Heart drew inspiration from these universes that layer opposing ideas to amplify their themes. “You know what I mean... the nauseatingly cheerful ‘Bright New World!’ poster, with the grinning nuclear family still somehow stapled to a half-blown-up lamppost in the middle of a toxic, dystopian hellscape,” they note. “That was the magic contrast we wanted to replicate.”