Injected with energy: Village Green craft a fluid, shape-shifting identity for Bob Industries

Great minds and creative talent meet at the LA-based Bob Industries, which represents directors, producers, writers and partners ‘who seek to tell great stories that touch and satisfy the viewer.’ As a hub of creativity with work that spans across entertainment, advertising, commercial and digital content, they needed an identity to reflect their can-do attitude. For London-based studio Village Green – who designed the brand and its visual language – one of the key aspects to highlight through the identity was the diversity of minds and voices represented by Bob’s team; an idea, which when translated visually, led to the versatile, mutating identity. The wordmark, set in Baikal, changes form and shape at a breathless speed – when seen in motion, it expands, contracts, slants over in an italicised form, and in the next moment, is splashed across the screen in a dizzying pattern. “The team at Bob Industries are proud of their efforts to be inclusive and far-reaching when choosing their directors, and wanted to reflect these values in their new identity,” recalls Village Green’s Creative Lead, Tom Fearn. “They were keen not to be seen as conventional so we explored a shape-shifting logo to celebrate this notion of difference.” In one case, the word mark, which hints at ‘California’s golden age of advertising,’ turns vertical, with the alphabets stacked over one another to create a spectacled face, with darting eyes. When you meet him on the website, for the few seconds that it takes for the page to load, be sure to say hi to Bob. In a way, the energy of the identity rests on the versatility of the leading typeface. “Baikal had all the elements we wanted from a typeface – a large set of weights, from condensed or extended (and anything in between), each of which looked great,” Fearn explains. The colour palette, which “originated from a mood board of photography from Santa Monica, where Bob Industries is based,” subtly reiterates the notions of diversity, as it changes with every visit to the website.